In spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of … emigrating.

And when it does, I often seem to hear about it. My e-mail inbox, quiescent until recently, has since early March begun to fill up again—just as it had done before the 2008 presidential election—with requests from Americans as to how they can move to Australia, and what the job prospects are for them in my country.

This is not an exclusively U.S. phenomenon. When I visited London in November and December 2009, I found the same thing, at a much more spectacular level. I wish I had five pounds for every Londoner who, during my stay, told me that he or she would move to Australia “if I were 10 years younger”. Or once, more poignantly still: “if I were 30 years younger.”

Strikingly, these regrets came, not from those footloose types who used to constitute the species Remittance Man, but from the prosperously employed or the comfortably retired. Neither wanderlust nor hardship—except, on occasion, a genteel variety of hardship—pertained. Some had actually visited Sydney (which is almost like saying “I know America because I visited Disneyland”). Most had never been to Australia at all.

I cannot claim to know anything more about my correspondents’ backgrounds except what they choose to tell me. The fact that they are telling me anything is itself remarkable. If scribes as unimportant as I are getting a steady trickle of these missives, imagine how many of them a powerful political columnist like Laurie Oakes—Australia’s approximate answer to the late James Reston—must be receiving.

“America imported an unassimilable underclass. Australia imported an unassimilable overclass. You decide which was the stupider idea.”

Occasionally a request for information about Australian prospects is accompanied by an inquiry about how Americans would fare in New Zealand. Here I can be of even less use, I suspect. I have not spent any significant time in New Zealand since 1981. Which means that for all practical purposes I have not spent any significant time in New Zealand since about 1881. The Auckland airport’s sole distinguishing feature comprised the profusion of signs in Mandarin Chinese, which seemed to say (judging by their adjoining English translations) “No spitting”. Yep, it seems as if New Zealanders too are being inducted into the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.

All I can otherwise stress regarding New Zealand affairs is that New Zealand and Australia are in fact different countries, a truth not always discerned by Americans. Few literature majors know that Truman Capote, before he decided to base In Cold Blood upon the Clutter massacre in Kansas, toyed with writing a non-fiction novel about one of New Zealand’s few internationally celebrated homicides. He seems, however, to have shed only gradually his belief that the killing was Australian. When informed by Sydney journalist David McNicoll that it had actually taken place in New Zealand (in Christchurch, to be exact), Capote blandly replied: “I thought you two were joined together.”

Having completed Geography 101, we may perhaps pass to a few aspects of Australian living that Americans might need to know, although they are unlikely to find these data on the Tourism Australia website—I have relied either upon my own experiences or on the reports of trusted friends. Here goes, then:

(1) Should your sole Australian knowledge derive from cinema or television, expunge said knowledge immediately from your consciousness. Australian movies such as Crocodile Dundee, and Australian soap operas such as Neighbors and Home and Away, were purveying fantasies even in the 1980s. Now they’re about as grittily realistic as Jeeves and Wooster. If Crocodile Dundee is still alive, he has probably started living in a same-sex partnership next door to a mosque.

(2) If you imagine that by coming to Australia you can flee the terrorism-obsessed Nanny State, forgeddaboutit. Leave your libertarian dreams back at the Mises Institute.

Two recent factors, above all, made Australia what it is today. First, the 2002 Bali bombings. You have probably forgotten about these, but they had a psychic impact on Australians similar to that which 9/11 had on Americans. Second, mass Third World immigration, and in particular the swamping of Australian universities by full-fee-paying students from India, Pakistan, and China. (America imported an unassimilable underclass. Australia imported an unassimilable overclass. You decide which was the stupider idea.)

Go to Sydney’s Mascot Airport or Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport, and either will be as nasty an exhibition of Big Brother paranoia as LAX or JFK is. In November the Australian authorities had banned in-flight lipstick. That was, of course, before Detroit’s Underclothes Bomber. Perhaps our government will shortly force all air passengers to go nude. Covering an explosive with flesh-colored paint might tax even Nigerians’ celebrated ingenuity.

(3) Don’t underestimate the physical dangers of Australian life. In February 2007 Britain’s Guardian newspaper reported that “2,433 overseas visitors [to Australia], including 25 children, have died in the past seven years with causes of death ranging from drowning to heat stroke and even a jellyfish sting.” The occasional shark still eats the occasional tourist. This Guardian article quoted the Australian Reptile Park’s Craig Adams as advising that “A wombat can knock you over.” Don’t say you didn’t get fair warning. You finally chisel out a refund from the petty tyrants at the IRS, you blow the refund on a plane fare to Australia … only to be sent to eternity by a wild, untamed wombat.

Even without the necessity for vigilant wombatophobia, do be prepared to eschew creature comforts that you, as a proud American, take for granted. Air-conditioning and iced water, both regarded in America as of divine origin, are in Australia remarkably rare and often expensive. As is real estate: expect to pay three or four times the amount for an Australian home that you would need for a comparably-sized home anywhere in the States except, maybe, New York and Los Angeles.

(4) Don’t underestimate the horrors of reaching Australia in the first place. If you think that an 18-hour flight might be beyond your powers of endurance, don’t attempt it. Within Australia itself, distances are equally vast, however small and manageable they might look on the map. Domestic airfares, albeit lower now than 15 years ago, remain higher than what you are used to.

Once, in the years B. D. (Before Deinstitutionalization), Australia’s mental hospital care took two forms. There was the public-asylum form. Then there was the private-clinic form.

In the public-asylum form—Sydney’s Callan Park, Melbourne’s Yarra Bend—they basically locked you up for decades and threw away the key. (Former psychiatry professor John Cawte wrote a book called The Last of the Lunatics, which poignantly depicts the prevailing circumstances.)

The private-clinic form, exemplified by Chelmsford in Sydney’s hats-and-gloves northwestern suburbs, was much classier than the public-asylum one. Because at Chelmsford—the subject of a 1992 television documentary on Britain’s Channel Four—they took the trouble to kill you.

Say hello to Chelmsford’s Lord of Misrule, Harry “Deep Sleep” Bailey, who committed suicide in 1985 before he could be imprisoned for bumping off 26 of his patients. Bailey still has champions (any Wikipedia contributor’s criticisms of Bailey’s handiwork tend to result in accusations of being “a Scientology stooge”).

Long ago, Callan Park and Yarra Bend went the way of reel-to-reel tape. While since about 1990 deinstitutionalization has been as obviously absurd as Marxism and no-fault divorce, Australians are stuck with it under every conceivable future government.

Meanwhile, even the most violent patients can seldom get admitted to Australian cities’ public psych wards, where such wards still exist. So if your mental illness is incapacitating but you haven’t specifically been commanded by Radio Neptune through your dental plate to shoot your five closest neighbors, then tough luck. Unless you have your own health fund membership, in which case…

An autobiographical fragment may here be pardonable. Since childhood I have had major depression, unaided—but periodically worsened—by medicine or electroshock. How much life events caused this condition, how much heredity did so (my father hanged himself in 1994), I neither know nor obsessively care.

“Group therapy almost always gets dominated by one patient, usually menopausal, who missed her métier through being too Caucasian for an Oprah interview and insufficiently svelte for the starring role in Precious.”

In such circumstances, planning a “career” becomes a farce. One simply lives as austerely as possible; buys supermarkets’ generic brands; forgoes a car, indeed a driving license; inhabits the nether-world of contract work; walks rather than taking buses or trains—let alone taxis—and clings to private health insurance (which in Australia is largely unknown, and where known, has no connection with employers’ benefits). I stay teetotal for 363 days annually (allowing myself a glass of champagne for Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve), and avoid cigarettes. Once I tried cannabis, unaware it was cannabis; I felt so nauseated that I never touched it again, and merely contemplating other prohibited substances appalls me. My physical health is pretty good.

All of these trivia lead to saying that when the Black Dog periodically sinks his fangs into my carotid artery, I must be hospitalized in a private clinic. Such a clinic has two features. First, male patients will be only half as numerous as female patients. Secondly, the clientele will often be binge-drinkers, drug-addicts, and—a new antipodean development—the spectacularly obese.

Some of us had quaintly thought that mental illness possessed qualitative differences from drunks’ and space-cadets’ problems. Free will, for one thing. The mentally ill do not choose mental illness, though we can indubitably aggravate our illness. But not once have I met a druggie whom kidnappers released solely after he agreed to assume druggie status. Or a boozer whose boozing derived from bullies pouring grog down his throat, à la waterboarding at Abu Ghraib.

Nevertheless, in a private Australian psych clinic now, no differentiation between patients wrestling with a mental condition from infancy, versus patients who chose their condition simply by Bonging On or sculling Jack Daniels, must ever be suggested. Clearly, being a lush or hophead is always someone else’s fault. You are therefore—no less than any Haitian or Chilean toddler under the rubble—an authentic “victim”. Well, cozy clinic jargon like “addictive behavior victims” does sound more polite than “dipsos and stoners”.

Nor can you escape the tortures of “group therapy”, a procedure apparently imported from Maoist re-education camps to bourgeois Australia without the smallest intervening trace of individual self-respect. Group therapy promotes “the power of positive thinking”—the power of truthful thinking is clearly beneath consideration—and almost always gets dominated by one patient, usually menopausal, who missed her métier through being too Caucasian for an Oprah interview and insufficiently svelte for the starring role in Precious. The only way of properly greeting her fortissimo proclamations to complete strangers that “moy tablets have destroyed moy libido” is to rush towards the nearest bathroom before, or indeed after, you vomit.

And the obesity levels! We are not talking old-fashioned Falstaffian portliness, we are talking the moribund Henry VIII. Maybe we need the psych equivalent of Hugh Laurie’s Dr. House, limping with his cane, for diagnoses: “You’re not suffering from clerical sex abuse, you’re suffering from cheeseburger abuse. Get outta here.”

A decade ago, clinics had the opposite problem: anorexic teenage girls. Since no anorexic teenage girl admitted to proletarian origin, I can only assume that anorexia’s chief precipitant was an upper-class zip code.

It need further be said only that I was treated courteously by psychiatrists, incomprehensible though the mere ignorant layman like myself must find a “science” which in 1973 depathologized homosexuality through that fail-safe clinical method, a majority vote. From nurses I received particular kindness. From cleaning-ladies I received greater kindness still. And—must this really be spelled out?—I oppose reinstating the ancien régime’s viler elements: leucotomies, lobotomies, “chemical coshes”, Nurse Ratched’s progenitors.

I merely wish psych care’s physical improvement had been matched by comparable emphasis on individual responsibility. Dr. Cawte himself, concluding The Last of the Lunatics, realized that the old system’s sheer severity could represent hope:

“The greatest virtue of places like [the mental home in Adelaide, South Australia, where he worked] was of rallying—of summoning strength or courage after weakness, sickness or dejection ... Refuge—of a temporary kind—supported by sound medical care, provides one solution. Salutary refuge from community stresses is one moral of these recollections.”

Note for group therapists: “Salutary refuge” means “salutary refuge.” It does not mean “letting patients blame parents / the class structure / an insensitive Christian Brother for every problem they have from pill-popping to head-lice.”

In 1935, British journalist James Agate admitted to obsession with a juicy but fundamentally parochial murder case, while from Quetta—now in Pakistan, then in the Raj—came news of a quake which had left 20,000 dead. He told readers of his diary, Ego:

“This trial has moved me immensely, while the dreadful affair at Quetta makes no impression. The thousands who perished in that earthquake might be flies. I see no remedy for this, since one can’t order one’s feelings, and to pretend something different is merely hypocrisy.”

(Alistair Cooke and Jacques Barzun have been but two of the nine-volume Ego’s admirers.)

A decade after Agate’s musing, George Orwell either offered in person, or saw somebody else offer, to a woman (whom he only identifies as “intelligent”) a book that dealt with Nazi atrocities. The woman responded to this offer by begging: “Don’t show it to me, please don’t show it to me. It’ll only make me hate the Jews more than ever.”

To watch the coverage of Port-au-Prince’s latest and most spectacular descent into Hobbesianism is to wonder how widespread, in the West, similar sentiments now are apropos Haiti. Of course no-one—at least, no-one who wishes to hold down a responsible job—will now actually admit to being as indifferent to suffering Haitians as Agate was to suffering Quettans, or as shockingly malevolent as was the female whom Orwell mentioned toward exterminated Jews. We are all weepers now; have been ever since Dianamania first compelled the entire West’s population to check into Heartbreak Hotel. (“Now hear this. You will sob your heads off when contemplating the death of the People’s Princess in a car crash. And you will like it.”) Of global citizenship’s public demands on the tear-ducts, there is today simply no opting out. In private ... it might, just might, be another tale.

“It would necessitate a Bono—worse, a Bob Geldof—to conclude that the average post-tsunami welfare donation was ever put to anything even vaguely resembling post-tsunami welfare.

It would be even more obviously another tale if more Westerners were to acquaint themselves, or reacquaint themselves, with the outcome of a disaster almost as great as Haiti’s in terms of lives lost (approximately 100,000), but on the other side of the world. The earthquake in question, starting two minutes before noon and finishing at approximately seven minutes after noon on September 1, 1923, precipitated the wiping-out of Tokyo and nearby Yokohama. There is no improving, for sheer evocativeness, upon the words used by Richard Storry (1913-1982), Professor of Japanese Studies at Oxford, in his History of Modern Japan:

“Nearly everything ... redolent of Yedo [the medieval Japanese capital] was a heap of ashes. In its place there rose a city of a striking beauty, with wide streets and high modern buildings at its core, surrounded by a vast jumble of new wooden houses clustered along undistinguished thoroughfares; some of these resembled country lanes and so acquired a certain pensive charm. Within three or four years there was little sign that Tokyo had ever known calamity.” [Emphasis added]

Does anyone not a moron seriously suppose that within three or four years, or within 30 or 40 years, Haiti will be similarly furbished? Does anyone with the smallest knowledge of the devastation which the December 2004 tsunami inflicted on Indonesia and Sri Lanka, in particular, imagine that Tokyo-style infrastructural improvement will take place in those miserable lands? Confronted with the ample evidence that successive Indonesian regimes since the 1940s have diverted all foreign aid either to Zurich bank accounts, or to improved military methods of turning subject races into glue (or, of course, to both), it would necessitate a Bono—worse, a Bob Geldof—to conclude that the average post-tsunami welfare donation was ever put to anything even vaguely resembling post-tsunami welfare.

But we can’t continue thinking on these lines now, can we? The horrible suggestion that Japanese can run a country, and that Haitians can’t, might lead to the equally horrible suggestion that Japanese have a recognizable civilization and that Haitians don’t. Or the comparably unmentionable conjecture that the Marshall Plan did good to Italy and the Netherlands but would probably have been wasted on, say, Liberia. Which in turn—gasp!—foreshadows the appalling premise that some groups of people might conceivably be worthier of our practical help than are other groups of people. And once we’ve taken that diabolical idea on board, well, it’s Auschwitz all over again by Tuesday next.

With Haiti, then, as with most of life in 2010, it is quite simply better (as well as easier) not to think. Deciding which charities we can legitimately support, and which charities are merely shills for Idi Amin’s heirs, is a procedure too risky to be tried. Let us suppress all tendencies to the evils of Thought by recalling Steve Sailer’s words from 2005: “the economics of mass media are: ‘Clever things make people feel stupid and unexpected things make them feel scared’.”

So when the next natural catastrophe occurs—in Togo or Nicaragua or Laos or wherever—let us operate feel-good campaigns on the same non-principle we now employ, the one spelt out by Woodrow Wilson in 1915. “I am going to teach the South American republics,” he harrumphed, “to elect good men.” He was really talking about Mexico—not about the South American republics at all—but then, geography and foreign history were never his strong points. Heaven forbid that they should ever be ours.

]]>Articles by R.J. StoveMy Short Happy Life As a Knowledge Management Dronetag:takimag.com,2009:article/1.93022009-04-02T13:58:03Z1999-11-30T00:00:00ZR.J. Stoverjstove@takimag.com

This story (the title of which alludes to Jessica Mitford’s October 1974 Atlantic Monthly report, “My Short And Happy Life as a Distinguished Professor”) really begins with two processes that became obvious to Australians in early 2008. First, there was the evidence—clear from the American media’s caterwauling about the subprime meltdown—that a world recession was a matter of “when,” not “if.” And second, there was the fact that Australia approached America in the “have pulse, go to graduate school” mindset.

After a quarter-century of avoiding the Servile State’s educational arm, I had reached a stage where, without further university study, I was almost unemployable. In 2008 I turned 47. Let no one say that Australia since the 1980s has ever had anything like full employment for its white heterosexual males over 35. Moreover, as far as authorship was concerned, I—along with several others – had traveled the downward path from mild Australian prosperity to almost complete Australian unpublishability. (I described this path in a piece called “Wizards of Oz” for The American Conservative on June 5, 2006.) No joy there.

So when I attended a public seminar about job and training prospects for librarianship, I greeted it with almost indecent enthusiasm. After all, my working life, such as it was, pretty much revolved around libraries anyhow. Every time I prepared an article for consideration by TAC, Takimag, Modern Age, and other notable U.S. magazines, I burrowed my way through library stacks. I had produced three non-fiction books that required, for each step of their preparation, substantial knowledge of archives, databases, gazetteers, newspaper indices, and other areas of which the average Google-searcher grasps nothing. Attempting to become a librarian seemed the logical next step.

The oldest of the colleges hawking its wares at the seminar was, purely by virtue of its being the oldest, the one that appealed to me most. Mistake #1.

We shall here slightly disguise this institution’s real name by calling it Potash University. Potash was one of the half-dozen notionally pedagogic establishments that Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies, in a late and uncharacteristic rush of vote-catching blood to his sober Presbyterian head, felt the urge to found during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Architecturally it is just as depressing and sadistic as this description implies: a veritable orgy of glass boxes and brutalist concrete, indistinguishable from proletarian apartment blocks in Belgrade and Brasilia. The student population of Potash is a scarcely believable 43,000. It would defy even Sebastian Flyte and his blasted teddy bear to get nostalgic about this campus.

Mistake #2: believing Potash University’s claims to have a librarianship-related course at all. What it actually had—more fool me for not appreciating the implications of this—was a Graduate Diploma in Information and Knowledge Management. Which bears much the same relationship to what you and I would call librarianship, as cannibalism bears to Holy Communion.

From the time of the very first lecture I was overwhelmed by a sense of déjà vu. It did not take long to recollect exactly what early experiences I was reliving: namely, high school math. Saying that I was inadequate at high school math is like saying that Jack the Ripper had one or two misogyny issues. I was a veritable freak of mathematical ineptitude, who by rights should have been put on display for freakishness, like Tom Thumb and the Bearded Lady in happier times. This did not derive from any hostility towards math on my part. On the contrary, few could have matched the desperation of my desire to be mathematically capable. My brain simply suffered from what British literary critic Cyril Connolly, in another context, called “fierce and mutinous sloth.” Pound my little gray cells as I might, no math-comprehending (let alone math-performing) ability ever emerged thence. I always had the sensation of being talked at in Swahili.

And thus it was again, more than three decades later, at Potash. The more fluently the lecturers jaw-jawed about Information and Knowledge Management, the more confused I became. Frantically, I scribbled notes on lecture material that might just as well, so far as I was concerned, have been about thermodynamics, string theory, or any other arcana you wish to name. Periodically a lecturer would punctuate his discourse with entirely insincere requests that his hearers interrupt him if they failed to follow his reasoning. I could hardly obey his pleas. If I had, I would have been interrupting him after every sentence, and he would be, no doubt, still in the throes of giving his first lecture today.

During what spare time I had, I dutifully plowed through as much of the course’s bibliography as I could master. From these, and from the occasional throwaway comment uttered during tutorials, I gradually recognized Knowledge Management for what it was: the latest and hippest in a series of pseudo-sciences, on a par with phrenology, Freudianism, Margaret Mead’s Samoan “research,” and so-called “business studies.” Indeed, from this last-named, Knowledge Management derived a large amount of its feel-good jargon, most of the rest having been appropriated from Information Technology, with a sprinkling of metaphysics (one talk bore the rubric “The Ontological Framework of Knowledge Management”). It was no surprise to discover that most of my fellow students—who were young enough to be my children, and who may be accurately, if uncharitably, described as comprising the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere—had already completed IT degrees or were in the middle of completing them. Tutorials revealed what lectures had not: the student contingent’s almost complete incapacity for speaking understandable English.

In yet another respect, Knowledge Management resembled earlier pseudo-sciences: when it was not meaningless, it was either platitudinous or, more often, downright false. Its practitioners, both in the classroom and on the printed page, rhapsodized with Pavlovian promptitude about something called “the knowledge economy.” Once upon a time, in the Bad Old Days (we were asked to believe), people earned money by making things. Now, in the Brave New World, people earned money by thinking things. This Is The Knowledge Economy. We Love The Knowledge Economy. Long Live The Knowledge Economy. Rah Rah Rah!

No amount of contrary evidence could shake lecturers’, and textbook writers’, faith in this Knowledge Economy gig. The fact that every knowledge-worker I know is about to lose his job or has already lost it—even as plumbers, electricians, bricklayers, and other non-knowledge-workers are earning at least six-figure annual salaries—was simply not allowed to disturb the prevailing euphoria. Since at least euphoria made a change from impenetrability, I remained mostly silent.

But the real revelation came with what passed for the Potash library. It was a revelation for which one lecture should have provided—although in my case it did not furnish— adequate warning. This particular lecture maintained that once upon a time, in the Bad Old Days (yep, we’re back to that Manichean dichotomy again), libraries were horrible fascist places where users were expected to sit down and shut up. Now, in the Brave New World, libraries are dynamic, sexy, vibrant, multicultural paradises where you can improve your Creativity and Self-Esteem, and if you cannot speak enough intelligible English to buy a train ticket without an interpreter’s assistance, so much the better. These grisly criteria the Potash library amply fulfilled. So deafening was the prevalent noise level that trying to carry out any serious study there resembled trying to carry it out right under a flight path at Los Angeles Airport. Nor did wearisome, old-fashioned rules about abstaining from food and drink while on library premises prevail for a second. It was commonplace for the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere’s phalanxes to tap away at every available computer, while simultaneously ululating into their cell phones, scribbling over textbooks with highlighter pens, wolfing down spring rolls, and chugging enough Coke to sabotage even the most robust urinary tract.

* * *

For as long as I could—weeks rather than months, I am afraid—I endured all this, before nature intervened, in the form of illness. The character of this illness, I cannot hope to describe adequately. William Styron, in his Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, said it best when he wrote that such a collapse “remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its most extreme mode.” It prevented, for a long time, my reading anything: the simplest words on a page or screen would, before my eyes, become gibberish. Sleep and appetite became unimaginably distant recollections. Potash’s health services did everything they could to help. It was not much, and could not be much, what with a client base of 42,999 other students for whom they needed to be available. All I remember of the next few days are the panic attacks, the sobbing, the insistent voice in my head which repeatedly demanded that I kill myself—as my father had done in 1994—and the 4 a.m. ambulance journey to hospital, arranged by a health insurance counselor who had been worried by my admission of how insistent this voice was.

The worst of it all is that, now I am out of hospital and partially functional again, I shall never know whether I could have (as I undoubtedly should have) endured. There are much worse fates, after all, than essaying a silly pseudo-scientific postgraduate course. And almost certainly my illness was brewing sub-clinically, in any case. Nevertheless I am unable to escape the self-torment that would occur after a dishonorable discharge from the army.

Perhaps it is simply ludicrous for any culturally literate, middle-aged individual to imagine that 21st-century instruction at a government-funded Australian university (and Australia has no other kind of university, save for Sydney’s tiny private Catholic liberal arts school, Campion College) will be anything other than a racket of the sort I have described. Almost every development in the last half-century of Australian education has conspired to make these campuses intellectually and ethically infective: whether it be Menzies’ decision to perpetrate more of such campuses in the first place; or a subsequent Federal Labor Government’s decision (the 1980s’ so-called “Dawkins Revolution,” named for Education Minister John Dawkins) to turn perfectly respectable community colleges into fourth-rate universities by a mere act of legislative will, thereby creating a new student proletariat; or, worst of all, John Howard’s imposition of de facto civil disabilities on native-born Australian students in the most prestigious disciplines. (This last phenomenon is discussed in a book called The Howard Legacy, by Melbourne editor and chemist Peter Wilkinson.)

At any rate, one thing is clear: if you have a small private college of decent scholastic attainments situated near you, cherish it. Don’t imagine that its values, or any decently avowable values, will be transferable to a welfarist broiler-house. That was the error I made. That, and the further error of being 47 years old.

]]>Articles by R.J. StoveThe Hoax Down Undertag:takimag.com,2009:article/1.94382009-01-12T16:48:23Z1999-11-30T00:00:00ZR.J. Stoverjstove@takimag.comSay what you like against us Australians, there is one activity where we excel, and that is, in producing artistic hoaxers. The nonexistent modernist poetic genius “Ern Malley” in the 1940s; a subsequent platoon of “Aboriginal” creators (“B. Wongar”, “Wanda Koolmatrie”, “Eddie Burrup”) who invariably turned out to be about as “Aboriginal” as Nicole Kidman; a nonexistent Ukrainian novelist named “Helen Demidenko” (also known as, less exotically, Helen Darville and latterly Helen Dale); Norma Khouri, a fraudulent chronicler of honor killing in Jordan (who at least used her real name): all these, and others, indicate that on a per capita basis, Aussies could well be the most proficient artistic hoaxers in the world. It’s only a few days into 2009, but already we have another entrant in the Aussie hoaxer pantheon. Step forward “Sharon Gould”, alias Katherine Wilson, a blogger and activist who has done more damage to the 53-year-old Sydney-based, taxpayer-funded monthly magazine Quadrant than an army of Soviet dropkicks during the Cold War ever succeeded in effecting.

“Sharon Gould”—“not without malice prepense,” as Russell Kirk used to say in another context—submitted an article in praise of genetically modified food to Quadrant’s editor Keith Windschuttle, titled “Scare Campaigns and Science Reporting.” (In the interests of full disclosure, I might as well reveal that I was one of Windschuttle’s unsuccessful rivals for the editorial post when Quadrant’s board members publicly advertised it.) What “Gould” took elaborate care to conceal from Windschuttle was the fact that her article was—in Damon Runyon’s immortal words about Alice in Wonderland—“a pack of lies, though very interesting in spots.” She had made her “science” up, much as Alan Sokal (to whom she referred) had made his “science” up in 1996. As she herself put it on her website:

The essay is rife with outrageously stupid arguments. For example, it accurately reports that GM Golden Rice is bound in 70 patents and it’s natural for those companies to expect returns — yet it also argues (parroting biotech industry spin) that Golden Rice was developed for altruistic reasons, to solve third world malnutrition problems.

Considering Windschuttle’s fixation with academics’ footnotes (and the 98 media articles this fixation reportedly spawned), I thought I’d include some bogus ones of my own, and see if he bothers scrutinizing those. Some of the footnotes are completely fabricated. Others are genuine references to science articles, but have nought to do with what’s asserted in the essay.

Lastly, I make some claims which are laughable. For example, the made-up stuff about epigenes. I’m no scientist (didn’t even do Year 11 science), but I don’t imagine epigenes do the stuff I said they do. Even if they did, the essay totally ignores hazards like horizontal gene transfer, unpredictable novel proteins, etc. But hey, if you say you’re a scientist, you can get away with saying anything. Scientists, see, are a one-size-fits-all authority.

Did Windschuttle smell even the smallest rat? No. On the contrary, he expressed great pleasure at the submission:

I really like the article. You bring together some very important considerations about scientific method, the media, politics and morality that I know our readers would find illuminating… we would be very pleased to publish the article in our January [2009] edition.

Not only did it never occur to him to check the bona fides of “Sharon Gould”’s references. It never occurred to him to confirm that “Sharon Gould” actually existed, although five minutes’ Googling would have settled the latter issue. Almost unbelievably, Windschuttle is the second Quadrant editor in a row to have been publicly embarrassed by an apparent inability to use Google. Readers familiar with The American Conservative’s back-numbers may recall that it was just such a failure that, four years ago, prompted the late P. P. McGuinness to publish in Quadrant’s pages a convicted neo-Nazi, in sublime and almost touching ignorance regarding the latter’s protracted record of mayhem.

On Tuesday, January 6, just after Quadrant’s January issue (with the “Sharon Gould” effusion included) had reached subscribers and the newsstands, the gaff was blown. Author Margaret Simons announced in Crikey, an online magazine of predominant semi-literacy but occasional usefulness, that Windschuttle “ha[d] been taken in by a hoax intended to show that he will print outrageous propositions.” At this stage the true identity of “Sharon Gould” remained unconfirmed, though the blogosphere bubbled with conjecture on the subject. In less than two days’ time, Miss Simons proclaimed, again through Crikey, that “Sharon Gould” and the heavily pregnant Katherine Wilson were one and the same person.

For reasons best known to himself, Windschuttle—who now seems to have abandoned the serious historiography he used to carry out—appears to have been convinced that he possessed a twofold mission as Quadrant editor: first, to turn the magazine as far as possible into a monthly newsletter for the John Howard Government-in-Exile; second, to establish it (despite his own lack of scientific training) as a scientific authority, which it had never been and had never attempted to be. My own dealings with him were always polite enough. Yet little in his Quadrant editorship can be explained except as a pronounced case of self-destructiveness. Consider:

(a) In Quadrant’s May 2008 issue he defended—wait for it—plagiarism, insisting: “There are very few cases where plagiarism should be a sacking offence for a university teacher.”

(b) Notwithstanding cautions as to the inadvisability of this procedure, Quadrant continued to publish articles that, strictly speaking, were not Quadrant’s to publish. These articles emanated from one Hal Colebatch, who repeatedly peddled pieces to the periodical that had already appeared in other periodicals. Naturally Colebatch disdained to inform Quadrant that he was repeatedly offering it secondhand goods. This was not actually illegal behavior on Colebatch’s part, but it was indubitably unethical, and—like Windschuttle’s efforts to minimize plagiarism’s malice—it would have resulted in the instant dismissal of any executive editor foolhardy enough to sanction it at an American magazine.

(c) Quadrant’s resentment of Howard’s Prime Ministerial successor and opponent Kevin Rudd has become so obsessive that it is almost as if Windschuttle has been begging the Rudd Government to cut off Quadrant’s tax funds. Without such tax funds, of course, Quadrant would fold tomorrow. (In 1989, I publicly urged Quadrant to justify its free-market convictions by rejecting its welfare handouts and appointing a full-time classified advertising manager. My plea was, not surprisingly, treated with noisy contempt.)

Often enough Quadrant has been hated, but the “Sharon Gould” hoax represents the first time that Quadrant has been openly despised. All the leading national newspapers have carried front-page stories about the hoax and about Windschuttle’s gullibility. Even now, Windschuttle would seem unable to comprehend why anyone would question his abject failure to perform the smallest background checking.

Whether Quadrant can survive this latest furor, or whether a Federal Arts Ministry already impatient with it will simply pull the plug and thereby kill it off, is uncertain. Over the years there have been—in fact there still are—good and highly talented people associated with Quadrant. Remembrance of their devotion should stifle any tendencies toward Schadenfreude. From now on, new and unfamiliar writers in Australia who submit work to “little magazines” will be regarded as guilty of fraud until proven innocent. It is by no means patently clear that any “little magazine” can cope with that level of distrust.

Quadrant’s comprehensive humiliation over recent days ought to elicit sustained, disinterested debate about whether any sort of independent, contributor-paying, generalist treezine can survive, during the Internet era, in a country with Australia’s small, scattered, and largely anti-intellectual population. Alas, this debate is, barring a miracle, precisely what will not happen.

P.S.: A former Quadrant staffer of high intellectual acumen and moral probity assured me last year that the existing annual salary for the magazine’s editor was ... zero. What part of the phrase “Pay peanuts, get monkeys” is hard to understand?

]]>Articles by R.J. StoveThe Diversity Meltdown Down Undertag:takimag.com,2008:article/1.95592008-10-29T17:12:00Z1999-11-30T00:00:00ZR.J. Stoverjstove@takimag.comKaren De Coster’s article on “The Standard of Living Bubble” leaves open, inevitably, the question of foreign equivalents to the hoggish economic meltdown that Miss De Coster describes. Still unsolved, for instance, is the mystery of why Australia, so far, has managed (unlike, by the looks of it, France) to avoid the worst of the real estate bubble.

Why should this bizarre outcome be? It is not, after all, as if Australians possess a greater intrinsic virtue than Americans, or that they are any less addicted to spurious “wealth” via plastic cards and deficit financing. Australia’s welfare system is, by every conceivable criterion, far more Scandinavian and cocoon-like than the U.S.A.’s (as well as more centralized; the notion of different rates of welfare payment according to different states is unknown to Australia’s populace). Few with any knowledge of Australia would find it lacking in the entitlement culture. The concept of “owning” one’s own home is as deeply embedded in the Australian psyche as in the American. Always was, even before 1950s prosperity. Moreover, interest rates in the two countries are broadly comparable, and have been ever since the mid-1990s (in late-1980s Australia they went through the roof).

So why have the grotesque scenes of American foreclosure and repossession not been replicated in Australia? When the local news reports carried American stories of ousted homeowners wrecking their premises before the lenders could regain them, the response from Australians was of absolute disbelief. Such things, at present at least, are unimaginable here, except in the case of the occasional drug addict or Aboriginal layabout.

Yet facts are stubborn things. No Australian bank, whether any of the big four (ANZ, Westpac, National Australia Bank, and the Commonwealth) or any of the smaller players, has collapsed. Perhaps more tellingly still, the $700 billion American bailout excited disgust across the Australian political spectrum, to the extent that Australian politics has a spectrum.
The only explanation that comes readily to hand for the disparity between Australia’s situation and America’s is that, in spite of everything, our Third World ethnics are still somewhat less gruesome than your Third World ethnics. American Renaissance writer Thomas Jackson went so far as to say, last January, the following:

Australia has an immigration policy that is like ours stood on its head. The United States is filling up with unlettered Hispanics, who make every social problem worse, whether it is crime, school failure, illegitimacy, youth gangs, obesity, or drug-taking. Australia is importing hundreds of thousands of smart, hard-working people who are streaming into the nation’s best universities and working their way to the top.

This of course brings its own problems, notably the way in which the hard-working are almost as querulous about white “racism” as are the unlettered, and no more proficient at speaking any language identifiable as English. But it might make for less economic friction in the short term. Even “The Camp of the Saints” might be bearable if it could be marketed as The Ritz-Carlton of the Saints. Of course the unlettered have a way of turning the Ritz-Carlton into a camp anyway; and a camp, moreover, wholly unadorned by such courtesies as are famously encapsulated in a certain Ogden Nash poem.

Incidentally, if you’re a Takimag reader hoping to avoid the American economic Armageddon by settling in Australia, fuhgeddaboutit. Over the last decade for reasons explained here, both the current Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and his predecessor John Howard have been–in best Brechtian style–eagerly abolishing the people and appointing a new people.

If, on the other hand, you are a Sudanese rapist illiterate in your native tongue, with half a dozen equally illiterate spouses all under the age of consent, then the solution to your Weltschmerz is clear. Consult your nearest Australian consulate now.

]]>Articles by R.J. Stove20th Century Music—What Went Wrong?tag:takimag.com,2008:article/1.96022008-10-02T23:40:00Z1999-11-30T00:00:00ZR.J. Stoverjstove@takimag.comThe tale is told by M. F. Barnes, in her 1931 study Renaissance Vistas (and it has often been depicted by great painters, notably Botticelli and Carpaccio), of Saint Augustine, wandering along the seashore. Lost in cogitation upon the Holy Trinity, the saint meets a small boy who busies himself filling a hole in the sand with teaspoonfuls of water from the ocean. “What are you doing?” asks Saint Augustine. “Emptying the sea into this hollow,” the boy answers. “But that is impossible,” the saint exclaims. To which the boy responds: “Not more so than for you to put all the mystery of the Trinity into your small understanding.”

Anyone who has spent a year, as I have, attempting to write a short, one-volume history of classical music (I dislike the adjective “classical”, but can conceive of no better) will sympathize with that boy. However optimistically one begins, the work uncomfortably resembles trying to empty the sea with a teaspoon. When Berkeley-based musicologist Richard Taruskin wrote his own, predominantly splendid, Oxford History of Western Music (which appeared in 2005), he had the luxury of six volumes—and abundant staff-notation musical excerpts—at his disposal. Even then (whether through personal taste or through interventionist copy-editors), he ended up skimping his coverage of several topics. How much more skimping, therefore, must the hapless author of a one-volume history perpetrate! At his best, he will be bitterly aware of all the composers he has needed to leave out, who will line up in solemn and judgmental procession before his ashamed gaze, as Banquo’s descendants did before Macbeth’s. At his worst, he will make Procrustes look like a rank amateur.

The only thing that stopped me from being reduced to a state of total dithering impotence was the recognition (which dawned fairly early, I am pleased to report) that an honestly organized package tour is a legitimate endeavor, no less than is a pilgrimage or a sabbatical. My book had to serve as the equivalent of a package tour, confined as it was, and is, to 25,000 words. There could be no pretense that it matched Taruskin’s magnum opus, say, through sheer analytical depth. On the other hand, it would be as solidly constructed, highly polished, and readable as I could make it—with, perhaps, a capacity for piquing the interest of readers who would find Taruskin prohibitively erudite.

When you have only 25,000 words at your disposal, you become epigrammatic if it is the last thing you do. Inevitably there occurs the problem of how to treat those composers who demand inclusion (and whose omission would indicate outright incompetence on the historian’s part), yet who cannot be described in detail without breaching that adamantine word limit. Pretty soon, I worked out what had to be done with them. They would be summarized within a sentence, or at most within a paragraph. One aspect of my earlier life came to my rescue here: during the 1990s I broadcast a good deal on a Sydney classical FM radio station, where announcers had only a sentence or two in which to convey something of the composer whose music had just been performed.

So much for space considerations; but they were by no means my sole, or indeed my greatest, worry. There is also the little matter of necessarily discussing post-1945 classical music, a product notorious, on the whole, for emptying any concert hall quicker than the proverbial fire-hose.

This subject found Sir Kingsley Amis at his shocking best: “Twentieth-century music,” Amis wrote in 1982, “is like pedophilia. No matter how persuasively and persistently its champions urge their cause, it will never be accepted by the public at large, who will continue to regard it with incomprehension, outrage and repugnance.” Nine years beforehand, he had been more moderate and more discriminating, prepared to give certain twentieth-century composers a passing grade: “I still cling to parts of Sibelius, Rachmaninoff, Richard Strauss.” But that still leaves a lot of the twentieth century unaccounted for: because Rachmaninoff died in 1943, Strauss six years later, and Sibelius—despite surviving till 1957—released almost nothing after 1930.

Clearly something went horribly wrong with classical music in or shortly after 1945, something which left octogenarians like Strauss blissfully unaffected, yet which was almost bound to demoralize creators still in their youth. All right, then: what did go wrong?

The more I thought about the question, the less convinced I became that it could be answered by concentrating on technical considerations. Here I defiantly and unapologetically differ from E. Michael Jones, who devoted an entire volume (Dionysos Rising) to defending his conjecture that Wagner, aided by Schoenberg, brought about 1960s revolutionary violence through the sex-and-atheism-motivated destruction of musical tonality. Never mind the dubiousness of calling any of Wagner’s music—even at its most chromatically complex—atonal. Never mind the folly of calling the God-intoxicated Schoenberg an atheist. And never mind the effrontery involved in setting up a one-layman musical equivalent to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, with its clear implication (or, in certain cases of individual arrogance, its active assertion) that any religious believer, let alone any Catholic, who admires music by Wagner or Schoenberg is objectively in mortal sin. (Some have actually maintained that any praise for Wagner compositions indicates complicity in “the culture of death.” Presumably Pius XII, who revered Wagner’s output and gently chided Maria Callas for singing it in Italian instead of in German, was similarly culpable.) No, wherever the problem lay, it could not be accounted for by E. Michael Jones’ febrile quarter-truths. So where did it lie?

Gradually the solution came to me, as it must surely come to anyone who is enough of a historicist to appreciate the sheer novelty of our own music-producing arrangements. What characterized classical musical production after 1945—and what had almost never characterized classical musical production before 1945—was something so obvious, so much a part of our daily lives in 2007, that we seldom give a thought to it: namely, unlimited taxpayer funding.

We know what forms such funding takes when a Goebbels or a Zhdanov directs it. The forms it takes in the “free” world are usually less celebrated but hardly less grotesque (even if we leave aside such horrors as the National Endowment for the Arts’ pandering to pornographers like Robert Mapplethorpe). Does modern cultural history contain a more embarrassing hallucination than the CIA’s belief that by subsidizing Jackson Pollock it somehow strengthened Western values? Or (to return to musical examples) a more spectacular example of the liberal death-wish than Pierre Boulez’s career? Boulez, a self-confessed “300% Marxist-Leninist,” is on record as demanding that the world’s opera houses be blown up—this demand got him briefly arrested in Basle, Switzerland, after 9/11—and he has inspired from his acolytes such priceless instances of Stalin-speak as “In the years after the second world war, music went through a period when, out of historical necessity, it was unattractive.” Still he flourishes. During the 1960s, he reduced even André Malraux (a figure who at least possessed some native spiritual strength, however otherwise erroneous) to grovel mode. Why? Heaven knows it is not through any public fondness for Boulez’s music. Nor is it through his—admittedly substantial—conducting abilities. It is because he, like his fellow apparatchiks throughout the West, has shamed and bullied regime after regime into concluding that if it shows the slightest reluctance to bankroll him, it is ipso facto “Nazi”. (Alex Ross’s new survey The Rest Is Noise has fascinating data—which I discovered only after my guide had gone to press—about how Uncle Sam oversaw such hypermodernist lunacies in Germany amid the Cold War’s first stages.) In my book, I phrase the point thus:

“Orwellian bureaucrats, answerable to no one, determined the nature of such new music as would gain official sanction. This was no mere charity for occasional deserving cases, such as the Danish and Finnish governments’ pensions for, respectively, [Carl] Nielsen and Sibelius. This was the establishment of veritable states within states. For the first time in Western history outside Axis dictatorships, music would be not something that a private potentate or a church wanted, nor something for which customers had exhibited the faintest enthusiasm, but rather, something that dragooned audiences would get given, good and hard.”

Those last words are meant as a literary allusion. I had in mind, of course, H. L. Mencken’s definition of democracy.

It would, though, be ill-advised to end on too pessimistic a note. All the groaning and travailing of authorial parturition, particularly on so vast a theme, cannot conceal from me the fact that A Student’s Guide To Music History was, ultimately, a lot of fun to write. I hope that something of this enjoyment (as well as the research and sheer structural labor involved) transmits itself to the reader. And if I have somehow offended him—if he considers my attitude towards Mahler, for instance, to be hopelessly lukewarm, or if he has conceived a violent lust for Karlheinz Stockhausen’s creativity, or if he is irked by any other assessment in my pages—then he can always write his own book: helped in this task, it may be, by the bibliography near my guide’s end.

You have no idea what joy lies in discovering that there is another human being in one’s homeland who actually has heard of, and reads with pleasure, Samuel Francis. But so there is. Australia, where moral cowardice and insanely punitive libel laws have combined to produce an intellectual milieu even more squalid than the average Beltway think-tank, has actually allowed the publication of a Samuel Francis tribute. Written by the greatly gifted New South Wales poet, novelist, and essayist Peter Kocan, it appears (though not online as yet) in the September 2008 issue of the Sydney-based monthly Quadrant.
Since a serious and respectful Australian examination of Dr. Francis’s work represents a watershed in anybody’s language, it occurred to me that a few personal memories of Dr. Francis might deserve revealing. These have not been broadcast before; they are perhaps worth sharing now. I included some of them in a letter to Quadrant, which might or might not be published, and from which I have cannibalized part of what follows.
Meeting Dr. Francis—I never dared, as his friends did, to call him “Sam,” but it seems that only his enemies ever called him “Samuel”—was a remarkably unnerving experience. While the phrase “he didn’t suffer fools gladly” has become almost clichéd among obituarists, no other writer known to me made his impatience with folly so obvious from the first second. I was introduced to him in Washington DC at a 2003 party run by The American Conservative (the same periodical which some dubiously continent Western Australian intellectualoid calumniated in Quadrant’s January-February 2007 issue). At this stage TAC had not yet appointed me a contributing editor, but even if it had, I doubt if Dr. Francis’s initial manner would have mellowed.
He was a huge man, of Chestertonian bulk, with (like Chesterton) a speaking voice much higher and more diffident than would have been expected from so gigantic a figure. Once I had been introduced to him as “Rob Stove, who’s visiting from Australia,” he turned on me the full moral force of his coke-bottle glasses, and assured me: “I’m afraid I have no interest whatsoever in Australia.” Before I could say anything, he went on: “Or the rest of the Commonwealth,” in case I had been about to waylay him with a monologue on politics in Bangladesh or Trinidad.
This declaration, the equivalent of a boxer’s feinting, preceded 10 minutes of the most complete amicability on Dr. Francis’ part, at the end of which he gave me his office’s telephone number and hoped I would keep in contact. I recall one long subsequent phone conversation in which, to my undisguised pleasure, he passionately lauded an article of mine (which TAC had printed) on the subject of a 17th-century French poison scandal. It turned out that Dr. Francis had an encyclopedic knowledge of this scandal, as of so many other subjects about which he never publicly wrote. As we spoke (Dr. Francis at his office, myself in some run-down phone booth at a Washington Metro station), America seemed to melt away. The connivings of Louis XIV and his high-maintenance mistress Françoise-Athénaïs de Montespan appeared much more important and interesting than John Kerry or George W. Bush. Four years later, in all honesty, they still appear so.
I think Dr. Francis and I both hoped to catch up again—certainly I hoped we could—but we never did, although we exchanged some e-mails. His health, always a burden to him, deteriorated rapidly in late 2004. Before I could revisit the States, he had died.
Another anecdote, this time secondhand, surely warrants preservation for posterity. Dr. Francis had agreed to take part at a pro-family conference on porn, where every possible argument about what conservatives should do in the face of pornographers’ inroads had been already thrashed out. It was not in Dr. Francis’s nature to withhold protractedly from admirers the gift of his acidulous tongue. He told the gathering: “We paleoconservatives are totally opposed to pornography[theatrical pause] although we consume vast quantities of it.” A startled silence ensued, followed by audience laughter—the exact response that Dr. Francis must have sought.
Contrary to what stalkers suppose, it is actually rather easy to meet famous people. I have met, over the years, quite a few—I once met John Howard, and wasn’t that a thrill-and-a-half for both parties—but though I have fairly frequently met the famous, I have very seldom met the great. The great men I have met amount, in truth, to only five. They were B. A. Santamaria, the Australian political philosopher-activist; Sir Walter Crocker, the Australian diplomat; Carlo Felice Cillario, the Australo-Italo-Argentinian opera conductor; Pat Buchanan (who is the only one of the five still with us) ... and Sam Francis. Rest in peace, Sam, and may Mr. Kocan’s review bring you a new antipodean readership.

]]>Articles by R.J. StoveBuchanan &amp; Lukacs—Getting Personaltag:takimag.com,2008:article/1.98102008-06-02T13:55:00Z1999-11-30T00:00:00ZR.J. Stoverjstove@takimag.comMay I, even at this late stage of the John Lukacs controversy, offer a few thoughts that do not seem to have been articulated elsewhere on this site?

Readers have now stepped into a first-person authorial zone. They should be, accordingly, warned.

I have on my shelves a 2004 edition of Dr. Lukacs’s A Student’s Guide to the Study of History. It is a tiny book, but an almost uniformly worthwhile one, marred solely by Dr. Lukacs’s gross overestimate of Churchill’s trustworthiness as a historian. (Shades of the famous–Margot Asquith?–quip, “Winston has written his autobiography and called it The World Crisis.”) Without this opusculum of Dr. Lukacs’s as an example before my eyes, I could never have written (or, in fact, have started) my own little contribution to the ISI Student’s Guide series. So I owe Dr. Lukacs something of an intellectual debt.

What strikes me above all about Dr. Lukacs’s attack on Pat Buchanan is how completely, in this attack, he has ignored his own advice on writing history and, in particular, on assessing evidence. Blindsided, I can only assume, by his belief in the Immaculate Conception of Saint Winnie, he makes all the mistakes against which he specifically warns the novice historian in his Student’s Guide. The result is a somewhat distasteful “Don’t do as I do, do as I say.”

I am not currently, or ever, holding a brief for David Irving except insofar as I tend toward free-speech absolutism and wish to ban precious little apart from anti-Christian blasphemy. But it can hardly be denied–and it amazes me that this has not been pointed out elsewhere–that reading Dr. Lukacs on Mr. Irving is like reading Lord Macaulay on Charles I, James II, Queen Mary of Modena, or some other hate-object whose chief crime in Lord Macaulay’s view was that of not being Whig. The difference is that Lord Macaulay can still, however gross his (wholly sincere) fantasizing, be read with profit purely for his style. Whereas Dr. Lukacs’s style, at least in that review ...

As for Pat Buchanan (whose new book I have not yet read, though I hope to read it soon), it is with hesitation that I write of him at all. What can I say of Mr. Buchanan except that he is the greatest American in public life whom I have met? That almost every article and book by him which is known to me has broadened my historical and sociological understanding? That my occasional disagreements with him – I am utterly at odds with him on the topic of Putin’s Russia, for instance – have not impaired the esteem with which I, and many others far more important than I, regard his knowledge and his clarity of exposition?

Irrefutably a magazine, including a magazine which Mr. Buchanan helped to found, has a perfect right to hire whichever reviewers it likes to review whichever books it likes. I note with pleasure that this particular magazine has allowed criticismsofDr. Lukacs’s review on its own blog. (One does not immediately associate such freedom of speech with, to take a random instance, the Rupert Murdoch empire.) Nevertheless I find myself haunted by the following famous words:

“There is such a thing as legitimate warfare: war has its laws; there are things which may fairly be done, and things which may not be done. I say it with shame and with stern sorrow; he has attempted a great transgression; he has attempted (as I may call it) to poison the wells.”

If you know any 19th-century English prose at all, you probably know who wrote the above. Cardinal Newman, of course, from the preface to his Apologia.

I suggest that Dr. Lukacs’s review, in treating that specific book by that specific author for that specific periodical, poisoned the wells. I further suggest that many readers will henceforth feel doubts about Dr. Lukacs’s veracity on any historical topic more controversial than the weather. (Note that I am not implying conscious deceit by Dr. Lukacs. Who am I to imply such a motive?)

It is if anything harder for me to write about The American Conservative (on whose masthead I have the great privilege of appearing) than about Mr. Buchanan. No publication now active means more to me. Although I was not quite “present at the creation”, I at least imitated Dean Acheson to the extent of being present – and writing in its pages – when it was, so to speak, still in short trousers. It has been among the indispensable periodicals of my time (I would believe this even if it had rejected every line I ever submitted).

Whether outraged readers will cancel their subscriptions en masse, I do not know. What the fallout will be from Dr. Lukacs’s article as far as TAC’s – and by extension, print-media paleoconservatism’s – future is concerned, I likewise do not know. But for pity’s sake, let that future (whatever arguments we might have about tactics) be dignified, honorable, and recognizably adult: everything that, I regret to say, Dr. Lukacs’s original article failed to be.

If Mr. Buchanan can be likened to Mr. Irving, and thereby in practice thrown to the wolves, then which TAC contributors, past or present, cannot be thrown to the wolves? This strikes me as a valid question.

Moïse Tshombe is supposed to have said (in his final defeated years) that till his dying day, should his country want him, he would always answer “Present!” to any official summons. Should his country want him; and – Tshombe’s clear implication was – not a moment longer. It is in this spirit that some of us regard a possible summons from TAC. I must confess that as a result of Dr. Lukacs’s essay, the issue of what TAC’s senior editorship now wants is, for me and perhaps others, no mere academic affair.

May heaven pardon me if, in anything I have written here, I have been unjust to that senior editorship.

Review of Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, by Peter Gay: W. W. Norton, New York City, 2007, 610 pages

If a Nobel Prize existed for the authorial achievement that most obviously combines clichéd competence with ideological obsession, Peter Gay’s Modernism would win it at a canter. The review attributed to Dr. Johnson pre-emptively dealt with such works: “This book is both good and original, but the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good.” Gay’s originality rests, for the most part, upon his assumption—which makes Rip Van Winkle look like a veritable prodigy of sleepless diligence—that one can still ascribe intellectual merit to Freudianism. For Gay, there is no God but Freud, and Gay is his prophet. The author of an entire volume on the Godhead (Freud: A Life For Our Time), Gay demonstrates no more likelihood of abandoning his religion than does the nearest imam of abandoning his. Readers cannot say they were not warned: “Even when it [Freudianism] makes no explicit appearance,” Gay announces as early as page xxii of his latest publication, “it lies at the heart of my historian’s reading of the decades when modernism helped to define the realities of social and cultural life.” Unusually for a Freudian, he admits (a few lines afterwards) the force of Freud’s confession: “before the problem of the poet [Freud’s actual noun is the somewhat less specific Dichter], psychoanalysis must lay down its arms.” Gay fails to point out that Freud spent the greater part of his life doing the precise opposite, thereby perpetrating such howlers as basing his entire theory of Leonardo’s erotic tastes upon the mistranslation of one word. Being Freud, or even a disciple of same, means never having to say you’re sorry.

Sometimes, above all in Modernism’s earlier chapters, Gay manages to keep his Freudianism under decent control. He starts off in a workmanlike enough fashion, with modernism’s early history. Baudelaire emerges. Flaubert emerges. Both Baudelaire and Flaubert are prosecuted for obscenity and, in the former’s case, for blasphemy as well. Walt Whitman issues Leaves of Grass. Impressionist painters scandalize the public. Those Rising Middle Classes just keep on rising. The railways get built like nobody’s business. God’s obituary gets repeatedly written. The trouble with Gay’s narrative on these subjects is that a reader would have to be extremely ignorant, or extremely amnesiac, to find it unfamiliar. Since the 1950s, if not beforehand, it has been the essence of every university or community college course that was ever offered on modern art’s history. (The actual phrase “modern art” was first used, apparently, by the novelist J. K. Huysmans in 1879.) Gay does score a few insightful points, notably his frank acknowledgment of how slender a rationale T. S. Eliot possessed for trying to Christianize Baudelaire’s aesthetic, or, in Gay’s somewhat boorish terminology, “to hijack Baudelaire for the cause of Jesus.” (Boorishness is apt to mark Gay’s few comments on Christianity, or as he prefers to call it, “the Christian legend ... [which is] really, when you think about it, a highly improbable story.” Improbable compared with what? The Immaculate Conception of Saint Sigmund?) Nevertheless any adequate encyclopedia could supply much of the material Gay discusses, and his account is distinguished mostly for what it fails to include.

One would have relished, for example, a serious effort (or any effort) to explain that maniacal anti-bourgeoisie hatred which Baudelaire and, especially, Flaubert injected into modernism’s bloodstream. It was a hatred all the more ridiculous, and all the more dangerous, because it took the form of masochism: its artistic adherents being, after all, bourgeois themselves. Not a single aristocrat or prole in the entire bunch. Save for this obvious masochistic element, the emotion thus generated did not differ from Der Stürmer’s subsequent loathing of Jews, or from Stalin’s eventual cheery talk of “exterminating the kulaks as a class.” Fortunately, mere historical accidents—of the kind that Marxists, with their infantile determinism, suppose to be impossible—prevented Baudelaire and Flaubert, at least, from acting on their own hate’s implications. Gay could have treated this hate’s phenomenon at length, but instead he is content merely to note, in a civil and brief manner, its occurrence.

About one-third of the way through Modernism, the standard abruptly declines, as non-artistic criteria more and more influence the selection of topics. Page and pages deal with Oscar Wilde, not because of The Importance of Being Earnest, but because of his sexual martyr status. Virginia Woolf, thanks to her feminist rather than literary significance, makes it with predictable ease into Gay’s elect. (Mercifully, we are spared Sylvia Plath.) Marcel Duchamp—best known for his appropriating a urinal, calling it art, and signing it “R. Mutt”—becomes “the truly indispensable icon for its [modernism’s] history,” with the clear implication that this is a good thing to be. Gay quotes approvingly what is itself an approving description, by the abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell, of Duchamp: “the great saboteur.”

Naturally little matters like the difference, if any, between Duchamp-type art and deliberately parodistic non-art are primly ignored. Not a syllable in Gay about “Ern Malley,” the nonexistent Australian vers-libre purveyor whose creators fooled British modernist panjandrum Herbert Read—and hordes of others—into thinking him a neglected genius. Not a syllable, either, about the equally nonexistent composer “Piotr Zak,” whose Mobile for Tape and Percussion comprised simply twelve minutes’ worth of random noises recorded in a B.B.C. radio studio. Complete silence, also, about that pictorial masterpiece “And The Sun Was Setting Over The Adriatic,” which, after having been exhibited at Paris’s Salon des Indépendants, turned out to be the work of a donkey with a paintbrush affixed to its tail. (“Art is what you can get away with,” Andy Warhol later observed.) However much Gay invokes “the lure of heresy,” any heresy against his own modernist heroes’ dogmas obviously must not be sanctioned even by being noted. The more grotesque a particular modernist’s self-assurance, the more Gay tends to take him at his own valuation. This is a strange role for a historian (rather than a public-relations shill) to be adopting, but one with which Gay sees no problem.

Each deity in modernism’s pre-1945 Valhalla—Picasso, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Charles Ives, Charlie Chaplin, Eisenstein, Orson Welles, Frank Lloyd Wright—gets much the same blandly eulogistic treatment from Gay. When he ventures a criticism, as he does of Mies van der Rohe’s scorn for his generous patrons or of Le Corbusier’s truckling towards Marshal Pétain’s régime, the effect is all the more notable and agreeable because it so rarely happens. (Knut Hamsun is castigated for his latter-day pro-Nazi sentiments, but the lifelong Communist sycophancy of Louis Aragon, Bertolt Brecht, and Pablo Neruda is not mentioned at all.) Otherwise, instead of analysis, readers are supplied with mere reverential profiling. They must look elsewhere for honest admissions of – for instance – Picasso’s psychopathic misogyny (when are feminists going to start uttering serious protests against this?), or of Stravinsky’s post-1918 creative decline, or of Ives’s willfully blatant amateurism. (The only thing to be said for most of Ives’s music is that most of his prose is more childish still: a fact liberally, though not perhaps wittingly, demonstrated by Gay’s numerous quotes.)

Since Gay’s chief concern lies with the visual arts, it is mainly with other commentators on these arts that he must be compared; and the inescapable result of such a comparison is this. By now the sole justifications for churning out a generalist account of visual arts’ modernism are if an author is blessed with a brilliant prose style that can compensate for his conventional thinking (Robert Hughes’s studies The Shock of the New and American Visions are examples of such a style), or if he is genuinely and valorously contrarian in spirit (as Paul Johnson is in his Art: A New History). Gay, lacking both Hughes’ brilliance and Johnson’s courage, is bound to disappoint and, worse, to bore.

Yet if Gay’s account of pre-1945 modernism is a prisoner to idées reçues, his account of modernism after World War II is almost tabloid in its superficiality. The modernist revolution, we are assured, “bounced back into vigorous life in 1945 once again” after Hitler’s and Mussolini’s (Mussolini’s!) attempts to crush it. And of what did this postwar “vigorous life” consist? Well, action painting for one thing. “The place of Jackson Pollock in the modernist pantheon is secure,” Gay proclaims, thus deftly sidestepping the question of whether Pollock was any good or not. He also sidesteps the question of how Pollock came to be hailed as a master in the first place. In particular, he is silent on the CIA’s determination to ram abstract expressionist “painting” down the world’s throat, the relevant spooks suffering from a quaint belief that copious doses of “Jack the Dripper” (Time magazine’s felicitous phrase) would weaken Soviet rule. The fact that post-1945 modernism was fundamentally subsidized by the hapless taxpayer – whereas at least pre-1945 modernists had needed to make do with whatever private patrons they could find – is surely a truth of some genuine sociological importance. But you would never guess it from Gay, any more than you would guess from Gay the lasting spiritual consequences of arts largely divorced from a willing public. Possibly the most quintessentially modernist sentence in Gay’s entire book is to be found on page 562: “I recommend Warhol’s a (a novel) (1965), which, despite the praise it has received, is virtually incomprehensible.” So it’s virtually incomprehensible, but he recommends it anyway. “In this shop,” C. S. Lewis noted with some asperity about modernist emporia, “the customer is always wrong.”

Confidence in Gay’s jolly artistic prescriptions for human happiness – which include a lavish tribute to Frank Gehry’s 1997 design for Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum – is hardly fortified by his outright errors. Not content with his supposition (in a section on the Franco-American composer Edgard Varèse) that there is a legitimate English word spelt “accompanyist”, he errs even in so readily ascertainable a datum as the year of The Rite of Spring‘s first performance: it was not 1911, as he imagines, but 1913. Picasso, who died in 1973, is credited on page 442 with living till 1979. Gabriel García Márquez’s year of birth is said by Gay to be 1928, when every reference source known to this reviewer gives the year as 1927. Moreover, it is actively false to deny Brecht’s Jewish ancestry, which itself ensured that he would have had no German future under the Nuremberg Laws. (This ancestry did not prevent him from his own typically expectorant brand of Jew-baiting: “The spit gives out,” he once remarked, “before the Jews do.”)

Altogether Gay’s is a production that, if offered as a bachelor’s thesis and purged of its more conspicuous psychobabble, might warrant indulgence. Offered on the open literary market, it scarcely even begins to compete with existing analyses, including the Hughes and Johnson books mentioned above. Its author’s distaste for sustained criticism of his more fashionable love-objects so falsifies the overall historical picture which he means to convey, that a phrase of Chesterton about the dangers of grand cultural theories comes to mind. “Theories of that sort,” Chesterton wrote, “must be rather easy to make up – if you leave out more than half the facts.”

R. J. Stove lives in Melbourne, Australia, and is the author of the newly published A Student’s Guide to Music History.

]]>Articles by R.J. StoveThe Death of Music by the Spirit of Government Subsidiestag:takimag.com,2008:article/1.101222008-01-26T18:31:00Z1999-11-30T00:00:00ZR.J. Stoverjstove@takimag.com

The tale is told by M. F. Barnes, in her 1931 study Renaissance Vistas (and it has often been depicted by great painters, notably Botticelli and Carpaccio), of Saint Augustine, wandering along the seashore. Lost in cogitation upon the Holy Trinity, the saint meets a small boy who busies himself filling a hole in the sand with teaspoonfuls of water from the ocean. “What are you doing?” asks Saint Augustine. “Emptying the sea into this hollow,” the boy answers. “But that is impossible,” the saint exclaims. To which the boy responds: “Not more so than for you to put all the mystery of the Trinity into your small understanding.”

Anyone who has spent a year, as I have, attempting to write a short, one-volume history of classical music (I dislike the adjective “classical”, but can conceive of no better) will sympathize with that boy. However optimistically one begins, the work uncomfortably resembles trying to empty the sea with a teaspoon. When Berkeley-based musicologist Richard Taruskin wrote his own, predominantly splendid, Oxford History of Western Music (which appeared in 2005), he had the luxury of six volumes—and abundant staff-notation musical excerpts—at his disposal. Even then (whether through personal taste or through interventionist copy-editors), he ended up skimping his coverage of several topics. How much more skimping, therefore, must the hapless author of a one-volume history perpetrate! At his best, he will be bitterly aware of all the composers he has needed to leave out, who will line up in solemn and judgmental procession before his ashamed gaze, as Banquo’s descendants did before Macbeth’s. At his worst, he will make Procrustes look like a rank amateur.

The only thing that stopped me from being reduced to a state of total dithering impotence was the recognition (which dawned fairly early, I am pleased to report) that an honestly organized package tour is a legitimate endeavor, no less than is a pilgrimage or a sabbatical. My book had to serve as the equivalent of a package tour, confined as it was, and is, to 25,000 words. There could be no pretense that it matched Taruskin’s magnum opus, say, through sheer analytical depth. On the other hand, it would be as solidly constructed, highly polished, and readable as I could make it—with, perhaps, a capacity for piquing the interest of readers who would find Taruskin prohibitively erudite.

When you have only 25,000 words at your disposal, you become epigrammatic if it is the last thing you do. Inevitably there occurs the problem of how to treat those composers who demand inclusion (and whose omission would indicate outright incompetence on the historian’s part), yet who cannot be described in detail without breaching that adamantine word limit. Pretty soon, I worked out what had to be done with them. They would be summarized within a sentence, or at most within a paragraph. One aspect of my earlier life came to my rescue here: during the 1990s I broadcast a good deal on a Sydney classical FM radio station, where announcers had only a sentence or two in which to convey something of the composer whose music had just been performed.

So much for space considerations; but they were by no means my sole, or indeed my greatest, worry. There is also the little matter of necessarily discussing post-1945 classical music, a product notorious, on the whole, for emptying any concert hall quicker than the proverbial fire-hose.

This subject found Sir Kingsley Amis at his shocking best: “Twentieth-century music,” Amis wrote in 1982, “is like pedophilia. No matter how persuasively and persistently its champions urge their cause, it will never be accepted by the public at large, who will continue to regard it with incomprehension, outrage and repugnance.” Nine years beforehand, he had been more moderate and more discriminating, prepared to give certain twentieth-century composers a passing grade: “I still cling to parts of Sibelius, Rachmaninoff, Richard Strauss.” But that still leaves a lot of the twentieth century unaccounted for: because Rachmaninoff died in 1943, Strauss six years later, and Sibelius—despite surviving till 1957—released almost nothing after 1930.

Clearly something went horribly wrong with classical music in or shortly after 1945, something which left octogenarians like Strauss blissfully unaffected, yet which was almost bound to demoralize creators still in their youth. All right, then: what did go wrong?

The more I thought about the question, the less convinced I became that it could be answered by concentrating on technical considerations. Here I defiantly and unapologetically differ from E. Michael Jones, who devoted an entire volume (Dionysos Rising) to defending his conjecture that Wagner, aided by Schoenberg, brought about 1960s revolutionary violence through the sex-and-atheism-motivated destruction of musical tonality. Never mind the dubiousness of calling any of Wagner’s music—even at its most chromatically complex—atonal. Never mind the folly of calling the God-intoxicated Schoenberg an atheist. And never mind the effrontery involved in setting up a one-layman musical equivalent to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, with its clear implication (or, in certain cases of individual arrogance, its active assertion) that any religious believer, let alone any Catholic, who admires music by Wagner or Schoenberg is objectively in mortal sin. (Some have actually maintained that any praise for Wagner compositions indicates complicity in “the culture of death.” Presumably Pius XII, who revered Wagner’s output and gently chided Maria Callas for singing it in Italian instead of in German, was similarly culpable.) No, wherever the problem lay, it could not be accounted for by E. Michael Jones’ febrile quarter-truths. So where did it lie?

Gradually the solution came to me, as it must surely come to anyone who is enough of a historicist to appreciate the sheer novelty of our own music-producing arrangements. What characterized classical musical production after 1945—and what had almost never characterized classical musical production before 1945—was something so obvious, so much a part of our daily lives in 2007, that we seldom give a thought to it: namely, unlimited taxpayer funding.

We know what forms such funding takes when a Goebbels or a Zhdanov directs it. The forms it takes in the “free” world are usually less celebrated but hardly less grotesque (even if we leave aside such horrors as the National Endowment for the Arts’ pandering to pornographers like Robert Mapplethorpe). Does modern cultural history contain a more embarrassing hallucination than the CIA’s belief that by subsidizing Jackson Pollock it somehow strengthened Western values? Or (to return to musical examples) a more spectacular example of the liberal death-wish than Pierre Boulez’s career? Boulez, a self-confessed “300% Marxist-Leninist,” is on record as demanding that the world’s opera houses be blown up—this demand got him briefly arrested in Basle, Switzerland, after 9/11—and he has inspired from his acolytes such priceless instances of Stalin-speak as “In the years after the second world war, music went through a period when, out of historical necessity, it was unattractive.” Still he flourishes. During the 1960s, he reduced even André Malraux (a figure who at least possessed some native spiritual strength, however otherwise erroneous) to grovel mode. Why? Heaven knows it is not through any public fondness for Boulez’s music. Nor is it through his—admittedly substantial—conducting abilities. It is because he, like his fellow apparatchiks throughout the West, has shamed and bullied regime after regime into concluding that if it shows the slightest reluctance to bankroll him, it is ipso facto “Nazi”. (Alex Ross’s new survey The Rest Is Noise has fascinating data—which I discovered only after my guide had gone to press—about how Uncle Sam oversaw such hypermodernist lunacies in Germany amid the Cold War’s first stages.) In my book, I phrase the point thus:

“Orwellian bureaucrats, answerable to no one, determined the nature of such new music as would gain official sanction. This was no mere charity for occasional deserving cases, such as the Danish and Finnish governments’ pensions for, respectively, [Carl] Nielsen and Sibelius. This was the establishment of veritable states within states. For the first time in Western history outside Axis dictatorships, music would be not something that a private potentate or a church wanted, nor something for which customers had exhibited the faintest enthusiasm, but rather, something that dragooned audiences would get given, good and hard.”

Those last words are meant as a literary allusion. I had in mind, of course, H. L. Mencken’s definition of democracy.

It would, though, be ill-advised to end on too pessimistic a note. All the groaning and travailing of authorial parturition, particularly on so vast a theme, cannot conceal from me the fact that A Student’s Guide To Music History was, ultimately, a lot of fun to write. I hope that something of this enjoyment (as well as the research and sheer structural labor involved) transmits itself to the reader. And if I have somehow offended him—if he considers my attitude towards Mahler, for instance, to be hopelessly lukewarm, or if he has conceived a violent lust for Karlheinz Stockhausen’s creativity, or if he is irked by any other assessment in my pages—then he can always write his own book: helped in this task, it may be, by the bibliography near my guide’s end.

]]>Articles by R.J. StoveDid I Kill Robert Lowell?tag:takimag.com,2007:article/1.104052007-09-26T03:01:00Z1999-11-30T00:00:00ZR.J. Stoverjstove@takimag.com

You may have heard of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. But you probably haven’t heard of The Man Who Killed Robert Lowell.

So who did kill Robert Lowell?

Well, I have a horrible suspicion that I did.

Quite accidentally, you understand. It happened like this (members of the jury).

In 1974, the year I turned 13, my parents—having accurately and soberly diagnosed me as a congenital unemployable—needed to confront the question of where to put me in the interval before I could be inflicted on an unsuspecting job market. I was marginally too clever for a sheltered workshop, and the French Foreign Legion wouldn’t accept 13-year-olds.

Then they discovered what seemed like the answer to their prayers. Where are congenital unemployables traditionally placed? In a performing arts school, natch. And downtown Sydney had just such a school.

Now don’t assume that this school contained the all-singing, all-dancing, all-pouting poppets familiar from movies like Fame. This was laid-back Australia, remember. Had we possessed a school anthem (you’ll recall Fame‘s: “I want to live forever / I want to learn how to fly ....”), it would’ve gone something like:

I want to loaf forever
Learning is just so much cant
I’ll never get it together
So give me my new federal grant.

If memory serves, the selection procedure consisted of some bureaucrat pointing to a piano and asking the applicant “Can you tell me if this is (a) a piano, (b) a violin, or (c) a clarinet?” Almost anyone who picked (a) was accepted.

Once you had been accepted, what behavior could be tolerated? Pretty much any. The “self-esteem” gospel had already begun sweeping through the Anglophone world’s education establishments. Classrooms rang with invocations of “dyslexia,” a fashionable 1970s euphemism for “illiteracy,” and a condition marked by its total nonexistence among Jews, Japanese, Chinese, or any other kids who fell below average television-watching levels. “Performing arts,” on which this particular place extorted parental money by priding itself, proved mere hiccups in the core curriculum of surfing parties, beach parties, bong parties, Spin-the-Bottle parties (a phrase surely archaic enough to require translating for Paris Hilton’s coevals), plain old choking-on-your-own-drunken-vomit parties, or combinations of all five. While I shunned them, I did nothing to prevent them.

When these Animal House delights temporarily palled, there was always the joy of destroying the belongings of any student who did his homework. About the only thing not on the agenda was wandering around naked, like the juvenile scholars at the progressive college immortalized by Patrick Dennis’s novel Auntie Mame. Our school achieved what many a feral American cheerleader vainly craves: the entire abolition of arbitrary borderlines between hazing and non-hazing.

Besides, “selective” performing arts school though it might be, it belonged to the state system as completely as does any modern socialistic crack-den in Detroit. During the 1970s, New South Wales’s teacher union bosses ran an openly Marxist closed shop. (Yes, Virginia, in those days Marxist meant Marxist. It did not mean “Derrida-worshiping professor of media studies” or “Let’s have some street theater on our way to Mommy’s merchant bank.”) Occasionally, and despite the union’s struggles, a dedicated teacher would emerge. Usually she left the following year, preferring somewhere comparatively civilized, like Lesotho.

In such an environment, you either acquire a hobby or go insane. I acquired a hobby: musical composition. Not that I was good at it, but others were worse. Eventually plodding, repetitive effort gave me musical techniques I inherently lacked. After much slaving, I learned how to harmonize a hymn tune according to music theory’s lexical rules. That was simply what I happened to do. Some kids collected stamps or coins. My school friend studied the missionary travels of St. Paul at an age where I still needed to consult the dictionary for half the words in MAD Magazine.

And then, in a moment’s epiphany, I fell in love—not with a girl, but with a project: setting Robert Lowell to music.

If few or no subjects are being taught, autodidacts unexpectedly pop up. Hence the decision of one kid in class, not blatantly bookish, to recite a poem by Lowell. I knew nothing of Lowell. I knew nothing of poetry, other than the sub rosa collection of obscene limericks then doing the classroom rounds, thanks largely to myself. I knew nothing of Jonathan Edwards, the poem’s putative subject. I listened to the first lines of “Mr. Edwards and the Spider.” At first I felt little interest. Then, gradually, it was as if a neutron bomb had gone off inside my head.

I saw the spiders marching through the air,
Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day
In latter August, when the hay
Came creaking to the barn. But where
The wind is westerly,
Where gnarled November makes the spiders fly
Into the apparitions of the sky ...

WHAM! Where had this stuff been all my life? How dare anyone use the English language that wonderfully? Set it to music? Man, it already was music: mysterious, exalted music at that. All I could do as aspiring composer would be to filter the poem’s background noise, as it were, through staff notation.

Of course the pride inseparable from teenaged artistic output soon took over. My youthful notion of composing was to write down one idea, then another idea, then another, then another. This created the general effect of someone flipping through TV channels with his remote control. (Subsequent generations would call my approach Attention Deficit Disorder, thereby opening entire vistas of profitable identity politics and subsidized Ritalian addiction, which I, characteristically, never imagined.) I remained unaware that Wagner once called composing “the art of transition.” So much the worse for Wagner, I would have said, if told of this epigram. The whole setting took me only about a week. Nowadays I take longer over writing laundry-lists.

Having surveyed my creation and decided that it was indeed the masterwork I had always suspected, I nevertheless dimly registered the need to get copyright clearance, Lowell being still alive. This could well present difficulties. Great poets’ estates have varied a great deal in their willingness to provide such clearances. A. E. Housman’s estate was so proverbially laissez-faire that half England’s musicians spent decades churning out Housman settings. But T. S. Eliot’s executors were widely believed to greet would-be composers with sawed-off shotguns. (This was before Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber got hold of Eliot’s cats.) With luck, Lowell might have more in common with Housman than with Eliot.

One method alone could determine the truth. I sent my manuscript (yes, manuscript: no score-notating software back then) to Lowell’s publisher, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Since it abounded in rubbings-out and crossings-out (no Wite-Out back then either), I am now amazed to think that HBJ did not simply consign it to the garbage. Particularly when I couched my covering letter in phraseology that had all the politeness and tact of an Internal Revenue demand.

In an astonishingly short time I heard from HBJ. It was extremely interested in my setting. So interested, indeed, that it would forward the score to Lowell himself, for him to decide whether he would countenance it or not.

A few more weeks passed, and nothing more happened.

Then—we are talking of one morning in September 1977—a headline jumped out at me from the Sydney Morning Herald issue which I was reading at a suburban rail station. “Robert Lowell, U.S. poet, dies at 60.”

It felt like a blow in the stomach. It felt like ten blows in the stomach, combined with having my kneecaps broken. If only some other, any other, American poet had died ... why did it have to be Lowell?

And almost immediately, following this train of thought, another, more panic-inducing still. The news report indicated that Lowell had suffered a fatal heart attack. What if my own temerity had killed Lowell? My mind raced towards the nightmarish scenario which could have unfolded. Which must have unfolded. Lowell had received my letter. Lowell had opened my letter. Lowell had glanced at the amateurish musical setting. Lowell had been so outraged by the audacity involved, that his weak heart could no longer cope with his wrath, and he died then and there.

On later reading Ian Hamilton’s Lowell biography, I discovered enough about Lowell’s final years to conclude that maybe he hadn’t expired from rage at my manuscript after all. A walking coronary waiting to happen, he had consumed booze and pills in such amounts as to uphold the proposition that Dylan Thomas was a piker. If the booze and pills weren’t enough to undermine his physique, there was his marital career, retrospectively recognizable as a mixture of Desperate Housewives, Million Dollar Baby, and World Championship Wrestling.

Perhaps, therefore, I can be acquitted of hastening Lowell’s death. Then again, perhaps not.

Poetic justice ensured that some years afterwards I mislaid my manuscript and never succeeded in finding it. Poetic injustice ensured that nine-tenths of it is still engraved on my memory. That’s what a guilty conscience does to you.

I had, at least, learnt my lesson. When I next dreamed of setting verses to music, I always made sure the versifier in question had already gone to his reward. Never again would I run even the smallest risk of manslaughter.

Others may dare to supply musical reworkings for sentiments by bards still in our midst. Me, I long ago decided to stick with the Dead Poets’ Society.

]]>Articles by R.J. StoveConfessions of an Australian Organisttag:takimag.com,2007:article/1.104922007-08-08T03:01:00Z1999-11-30T00:00:00ZR.J. Stoverjstove@takimag.com

It occurred to me recently that thirty years have elapsed since I first began earning money as a church organist. Perhaps in those thirty years, I may have learnt a few things of some general interest, worth passing on to others.

I’ve played in many Catholic churches, and in quite a few Anglican [Episcopalian] churches. But I don’t know the first thing about playing the organ in Presbyterian churches, or Lutheran churches, or any other churches. So what goes on there might be different from what I’ve undergone. I can only talk about what I myself have seen and heard.

My title, by the way, comes from a remark that an elderly lady once made to me after Mass. She asked me if I had been the organist. I admitted that I had been. During the Mass, I’d played various works by Bach, Mendelssohn, César Franck, and other reputable composers. Unfortunately I seem to have irked her by so doing. And she told me, “I wish you’d play something beautiful.”

I never found out what sort of piece she wanted me to play. Her advanced age seemed to preclude an unhealthy interest in the collected works of Britney Spears. At any rate, this little encounter confirmed what should have been obvious anyway, and that is, there’s a moral from one of Aesop’s fables that applies as much to organ-playing as to anything else. That moral is: “Try to please all, and you will please none.”

There are three quotes that I think are worth citing in this context. The first one was uttered by Handel, just after Messiah had first been performed in London. An aristocrat had told Handel that he and the others in the audience had found Messiah to be an “admirable entertainment.” Handel replied: “My Lord, I should be sorry if I only entertained them; I wished to make them better.”

My second quote is attributed to Camille Saint-Saëns, the eminent French composer. He had a job at the time, playing the organ in a fashionable part of Paris, and one day the priest complained to him about all this austere music that Saint-Saëns was performing. The priest urged him, as we’d now say, to “lighten up”. He told Saint-Saëns: “Monsieur Saint-Saëns, our congregation doesn’t want all that heavy music you keep performing. They’re upper middle class business types. They like to be entertained. In the evening they enjoy going to the music halls.” To which Saint-Saëns replied, with some asperity: “Monsieur le Curé, when, and only when, you include jokes from the music halls in your sermons, then, and only then, will I include music from the music halls in my organ-playing.”

My third quote isn’t from a musician. Instead, it’s from Evelyn Waugh, who wrote in his diary near the end of his life: “When I first came into the Church I was drawn not by the splendid ceremonies but the spectacle of the priest as a craftsman [emphasis mine]. He had an important job to do which none but he was qualified for.” Well, in a small way, the organist is also a craftsman, or at least, he should be a craftsman. The organist also has an important job to do, which none but he is qualified for.
Naturally this is to compare little things with great. The Catholic Church can survive perfectly well without organists. The Catholic Church could not survive a day without a validly ordained priesthood.

Mozart called the organ “the king of instruments.” Like any other king, it can use its power for good, or it can use its power for evil. Or it can be, as it too often is, in the hands of a player who’s too scared to use its power at all.

A British writer of the mid-twentieth century, who sported the magnificent name of Marmaduke P. Conway – with a name like that, he sounds as if he should have been hanging around with Bertie Wooster in the Drones Club, throwing bread – once said that “the organist is the general practitioner of music.” He was right.
If you don’t believe me, consider this. Most organists have to be able to sight-read. Most organists have to be able to improvise. Most organists have to be able to memorize. Most organists have to be prepared to transpose music up or down, without any preparation. All organists have to be able to judge, within a couple of seconds, how long a particular piece is. If it’s running overtime, and it’s keeping the priest waiting, they have to cut the piece short (while at the same time not making it sound as if it’s being cut short). If, on the other hand, there’s more time available than anyone imagined, organists have to be able to make split-second decisions to do a repeat, or to include an extra piece. With an organ that has a pedal-board, the player has to be almost as fluent with his feet as he is with his hands.

And that’s not counting the decisions an organist has to make about what stops he’ll use, how he’ll use them, when he’ll use them, whether they’re loud enough, soft enough, full enough, transparent enough, whatever. A solo pianist never has to worry about all that.

For there to be an organist, there must first be an organ. You might think that would be obvious, but if you did think that, you would be wrong. Organs at Catholic churches come in every imaginable shape and size, from the most majestic masterpieces that wouldn’t be out of place in St. Peter’s Basilica, to the disgusting little plastic contraptions which are known in the trade as “burp boxes”, and which sound like the sort of thing that a Las Vegas crematorium would reject for undue bad taste.

Somehow there’s often an inverse relationship between the wealth of a parish, and the quality of the organ. One of my happiest memories is of playing a truly superb church organ, one Christmas, in a suburb which only ever gets into the papers when its feral teenagers decide to have a riot. On the other hand, I can think of a few instruments on Sydney’s North Shore [the equivalent of Park Avenue – RJS] which I wouldn’t inflict on a dog, because they’re so cheap and nasty.

Just as organs come in all shapes and sizes, so too, organists come in all shapes and sizes. The top of the tree is occupied by cathedral organists. A cathedral organist has basically got it made. He has all the rights of any other church bureaucrat. Sick leave, holiday leave, compassionate leave, stress leave, you name it, he has it. In fact he probably has too many privileges. Nowadays, with all this media yelping about “clerical sex abuse, clerical sex abuse, clerical sex abuse,” it’s actually easier to dismiss a bishop than it is to dismiss the organist who plays at the bishop’s cathedral.

But cathedral organists are very much in a minority. If they get too many privileges, it’s fair to say most church organists probably get too few.

The usual procedure is that someone who can play the piano a little bit, gets roped in to play the organ. Never mind that the two instruments are totally different in all the ways that matter. Never mind that you need a completely different finger action on the organ, from what you need on the piano. An organ key (unlike a piano key) makes exactly the same amount of noise, however hard you bang it. In practice, this doesn’t seem to matter much, because a great many organists only ever become organists after they’ve been pianists of a sort. This is a pity, because it encourages the belief that organists are failed pianists.

It’s a pity in another respect as well. A lot of organists don’t think of themselves as organists, and as a result, they do their playing absolutely without reward. Now I’m afraid that on this subject I’ve become an absolute trade-union Stalinist (the Fred Kite of the organ world), because I happen to think that organists, if they’ve properly studied, deserve to be properly paid for their skill. After all, if the parish priest needed a plumber to fix the church lavatory, he wouldn’t expect the plumber to fix the church lavatory without payment. If he needed a tiler to repair the church roof after a storm had damaged it, he wouldn’t expect the tiler to repair the roof without payment. Then why does it seem outrageous that an organist – who, if he’s any good, will have trained for years – should be paid for the work he does?

Actually, that makes it sounds as if I’m having a swipe at priests, but I’m not. I find priests to be very sensible about paying properly for organ-playing. It’s certain rich laity who tend to give trouble, who get on their high horse about how you “should be playing for the glory of God” or some such thing. Well, when the plumber or the tiler fixes lavatories and repairs roofs without payment, for the glory of God, then I’ll start feeling guilty about getting paid as an organist. But not before.

In this respect, the priest is usually the organist’s friend. Priests very frequently have a lot of arcane musical knowledge. (This knowledge they invariably lose when they become bishops.) If a priest knows what sort of music he wants, and is willing to put his foot down in order to get it, then the organist will find that his own task is much easier.
Ideally the priest will give instructions well in advance. It’s good if the priest and the organist can meet in plenty of time, so that the priest can say: “I want X type of music for Gaudete Sunday. I want Y type of music for Pentecost. I want Z type of music for Trinity Sunday. What have you got in your repertoire that would suit those occasions?” And so forth. With a priest who’s prepared to give leadership, an organist can achieve almost anything. With a priest who isn’t prepared to give leadership, an organist can achieve absolutely nothing.

To speak of organists is also to speak of church choirs. Sometimes the organist is required to conduct the choir. This is a big mistake, like driving a car and, at the same time, attempting to direct traffic. It’s greatly preferable if the choir has its own director.

If the choir does have its own director, then he or she – it’s very often a she – needs to be able to give instructions to the organist as well as to the singers. In other words, the choir director should have the last word. The organist may legitimately advise her, but he should never even think of trying to upstage her, still less of trying to undercut her authority.

At this point, it makes sense to give a list of what the six priorities of all church musicians should be:
1.God.
2.The priest.
3.The music.
4.One’s colleagues.
5.Edifying parishioners.
6.Pleasing parishioners (optional extra).

OK, let’s say that you’ve got yourself a choir, and a choir director, and an organist. What next?

Well, this seems an appropriate moment to formulate Stove’s Three Laws of Church Choirs:
1.Small is better than big.
2.Young is better than old.
3.Simple is better than complicated.
Many church choirs are just too large for their own good. All too often, they’ll consist of a handful of singers who are genuinely musical, and a further dozen or so singers who are basically passengers.

Far better to have a choir of four singers only – soprano, alto, tenor, bass – if those four singers have what it takes. Fortunately, the ones at my own church (St. Aloysius’s Church in the Melbourne suburb of Caulfield), really do have what it takes. There are only four of them, and they sound thrilling. You mightn’t reckon that four singers can be really loud, but these four can seem terrifyingly loud, if they need to, because they are so well focused. And at the other extreme, if they need to sing softly, they can. But their soft singing has so much power in reserve, it can be clearly heard in every single part of the church. Again, this is because they are so well focused.

They also have the advantage of being reasonably young. Unfortunately – and there’s really no nice way of saying this – lots of choirs have voices which have passed their use-by date. No voice lasts forever, but there are those singers who can accept this fact with a good grace; and then on the other hand, there are those singers who just can’t admit even to themselves that it might be time to take a rest.

If your choir has an old buffer who is perpetually rabbiting on during rehearsals about how well he sang treble solos at the Adelaide Eucharistic Congress of 1927, it might be as well to envisage a polite but firm parting of the ways. Any tendencies on his part to address female choristers as “girlie” are also ominous warning signs.

A chorister who sounds really bad is likely to be also partially deaf. You do not need partially deaf people in your choir. Good choral singing consists of eighty per cent listening to every twenty per cent performing. The chorister not only needs to hear his own part; he needs to hear the other parts. If he can’t hear what his fellow singers are doing, he will never be able to blend in with them. If he can’t blend in with them, he will probably drown them out. Either way, musical balances will be sabotaged.

Yet another problem with numerous choirs is their habit of trying to tackle music which is really too difficult for them. I cannot for the life of me understand their reasons for doing this. One of the most popular Mass settings in the repertoire – no doubt for the simple reason that it’s been in print for years – is also one of the hardest to sing. It’s the O Quam Gloriosum Mass setting by Tomás Luis de Victoria, the sixteenth-century Spanish composer. Scores of church choirs in the English-speaking world feel obliged to have a crack at it, and I wish I could comprehend why they do. The tenor part is so excruciatingly high that it soars up into the stratosphere. You can’t very well transpose the whole piece down, in order to make the tenors’ job easier, because that pushes the already very low alto part through the floorboards. The result is usually chaos.

Much better to do a simple piece well, than to do a complicated piece badly. A lot of the choirs who hack and shriek their way through Mass settings like that Victoria one, would sound perfectly impressive if they just sang, for instance, a straightforward four-part hymn at Communion, either with no organ accompaniment at all, or with only a very soft organ backing. There are plenty of non-copyright examples of such music available these days on the Internet. I wish we’d had that resource available when I was a young man. Such straightforward pieces are much easier to rehearse too.

Talking of rehearsals, I wish we could dispense with the all too common habit of rehearsing just before Mass. Unless you have really first-rate singers, it never appears to work. Choristers who’ve spent the previous week violating the entire Decalogue will suddenly choose this particular time to go to confession, and will simply disappear. The choristers who do stay around for rehearsal will very often sing too loudly, in order to compensate for the absentees. Thus, their voices will probably be worn out for the actual Mass itself. Better to rehearse the previous day, or the previous evening, than to have a mad scramble on Sunday morning beforehand.

If a choir is very lucky, it might have some choice in where it performs while the Mass is going on. The best place to put a choir and an organist, is at the side of the church. The absolute worst place to put a choir and an organist is, regrettably, the most frequent place: namely, at the back of the church.

This is a bad position for two reasons. First, the distance from the altar – especially in a big church – makes it harder for either the choristers or the organist to see what the priest is doing. And the priest’s actions will supply all sorts of visual cues, which the choir and organist must be able to perceive. Second, a choir that the congregation can’t see, isn’t going to be nearly as well disciplined as a choir that the congregation can see. If choristers know that the eyes of the congregation are going to be on them, they are a great deal less likely to muck up.

Put ’em at the back, and there’s no limit to what troublemaking choristers can achieve. I have been present when a tenor has simply walked out of the choir in the middle of Mass, apparently because he was afraid that if he stood near the sopranos and altos, he would get Girl Germs. I have even been present when a politically extremist goon infiltrated a choir.

That is not a situation which the textbooks ever tell you about. This particular goon ... well, perhaps I shouldn’t actually refer to him as “neo-Nazi”, but let’s just say he had a criminal record for violence against Asians in protest marches, and that he publicly denied that the Holocaust ever happened, and that he was said to have been kicked out of another church because he kept giving Hitler salutes. Anyway, he was uncontrollable.

If he got bored with singing, and felt like playing the organ, he would just muscle and kick and shove his way over to the organ stool and play the organ. He only knew how to play one piece, so it wasn’t exactly a joy to listen to him, and anyway, he kept trying to play the organ during Lent, which organists are forbidden to do, at least in the Latin Mass, which this was.

It really upset him that we had a non-white soprano in this choir. But the bloke who really got up his nose was an inoffensive (and white) fellow bass singer. Anyway, my godfather tried to reason with the goon, whereupon the goon grabbed him and tried to beat him up. He was so enraged, it took two strong men to prise him off my godfather’s back. This was in the middle of Mass, mind you. I was playing the organ at the time, and it all happened so quickly I couldn’t do anything to intervene.

At times like that, there is only one thing to be done. You tell the priest what has happened, and you hope against hope that the priest has sufficient backbone to lay down the law. This priest, I’m afraid, didn’t. Not sure why, but he didn’t. So if you can’t get any satisfaction from the priest, even after several attempts, there’s only one thing you can do. You walk out.

What Dave Anderson emphasizes again and again, is that if you want to lead, you can’t afford to worry about being loved. More choirs have been destroyed through hail-fellow-well-met backslapping, than through the brisk courtesy that organists and choir directors should cultivate.

And of course, it must never even be whispered that an organist or choir director is giving preferential treatment to a chorister because he or she has amorous designs on said chorister. If it is whispered, then the damage is already done. The preferential treatment might in fact have been entirely innocent. Doesn’t matter. It’s too big a risk to take, especially in these days of compulsive litigation.

Altogether I might have painted a rather gloomy picture of life as a church organist. Why, then, do I continue with it?

Several reasons. The money’s quite nice, for one thing. In this connection, I would like to say a few words in favor of gangsterism. I once played for a Sydney wedding which, I have good reason to believe, involved a Chinese triad gang. Limousines in every direction. More elaborate flower arrangements than you’ve ever seen in your life before. The whole thing bespoke that social conservatism which is part and parcel of organized crime. Anyhow, after the wedding, I did what I usually do. I sought out the bride’s father, who is normally in charge of the payment. This bride’s father was affability itself. “How much you want?” he asked me, in his Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Man Chu accent. “Well, the usual fee is $100.” “Okay”, he replied. He pulled out the fattest wad of $100 notes I’ve ever seen in my life, and peeled one off, with less concern than if he’d just stubbed out a cigarette. I think that if I’d asked for $1,000 instead of $100, he would’ve given me that too, without batting an eyelid.

But there are other satisfactions too. So many great composers have adorned the organ’s heritage: from Girolamo Frescobaldi and Dietrich Buxtehude and Bach and Handel, through Mendelssohn and Franck, through the early twentieth-century Frenchmen Louis Vierne and Charles Tournemire, to Olivier Messiaen and Paul Hindemith: the list goes on. There are no dull moments.

Fine organ playing can achieve an eloquence beyond speech. I started off with a musical anecdote, and would like to finish with one.

When Anton Bruckner – who combined genius as a composer with genius as an organist – was given an award, fairly late in life, he announced: “I cannot find the words to thank you. But if there was an organ here, I could thank you.” Some of us organists feel the same way.

]]>Articles by R.J. StoveFalstaff in a Fedoratag:takimag.com,2007:article/1.104972007-08-06T03:01:00Z1999-11-30T00:00:00ZR.J. Stoverjstove@takimag.comIf Taki were a singer, he would be George Melly. Alas, if Taki were George Melly, he would be dead.

George Melly was a “fat and fairly famous” (his second wife’s words) British entertainer. He died in London on July 5, a month before his 81st birthday.

The Melly resume defied a one-line apophthegm—blues singer, jazz singer, journalist, screenwriter, historian of surrealist painting, all were equally accurate descriptions and all were incomplete—but if a single word could suffice to sum him up, that word would be the cobweb-laden “vaudevillian.” Seeing him in concert, a phrase he detested (“a transvestite flogging herself to death in 15-inch silver boots and a barbed-wire T-shirt is still described as ‘in concert,’” he complained in 1978), audiences were transported to the atmosphere of an Edwardian music-hall, albeit comprehensively enlivened by evocations of the tourist’s New Orleans and by Melly’s dutifully outrageous attire. Seldom without his fedora, two-toned shoes, and Zoot suit –the suit’s stripes guaranteed to induce migraine in any beholder at 50 paces—he aggravated, in old age, this ensemble’s grotesquerie by donning a piratical eyepatch. No doubt it all helped him avoid publicity.

Although he eventually crossed the Atlantic and even the Pacific, Melly left his heart in Liverpool. A depressing place to leave it, doubtless, but at least this upbringing enabled him afterwards to establish a degree of communication with John Lennon, at times when the latter’s bouts of obnoxiousness made all other human intercourse problematic. An autobiographical volume of Melly’s proclaims his Liverpool origins in its very title: Scouse Mouse. Of Lennon’s more feral behavior, Melly recollected in something like tranquillity:

This was no longer the loving hippy but the old aggressive scouser full of drink and God knows what else; the rocker who made it facing the trad-singer who�d tried to block his way. However, there was something we shared ... We were both Liverpudlians and Liverpool is the most chauvinist place in the world.

Long before Melly achieved national and, to a certain extent, international fame, he managed a personal victory of the sort widely assumed these days to be a myth. At high school he had been incorrigibly homosexual, though he always denied the allegation that his conquests included future Tory newspaper editor Sir Peregrine Worsthorne (“He [Worsthorne] was years older, so I wouldn’t have dared”). Then, all of a sudden, in his 20s, he discovered heterosexuality and liked it so much that he never returned to his earlier practices. This change, of course—by no means an uncommon phenomenon even now, and widespread in Melly’s own generation—cuts straight across modern homosexualist palaver about “identity politics” and “gay genes.” An acerbic sentence from Steve Sailer in The American Conservative (November 8, 2004 ) deserves quoting: “[M]any of the famous personages that homosexuals like to call their own later matured into heterosexuality, which contemporary gays claim is impossible.” It would be hard to think of anyone less like the Rabelaisian Melly than is the typical Homintern apparatchik, always on the qui vive for evidence of “discrimination” or “homophobia,” whether real or — more often — imagined. (As the late Hungarian satirist George Mikes observed, with a pleasing lexical precision, about such killjoys: “Why call them gay, the one thing they are not?”)

In 1986 Melly visited Australia, and I caught him at The Basement, a Sydney night club which housed almost every form of musical activity from ebullient Motown-cover artists to the most Dostoyevskyan practitioners of modernist “free jazz” gloom. Twenty-one years later I can still remember the event much better than I can remember last week. His band called itself the Feetwarmers, its leader being Melly’s fellow-Brit John Chilton, who added to his attainments as historian a trumpet virtuosity of sizzling power. Only in Britain could Chilton have remained so obscure. In America he would have been given three Pulitzer Prizes and starred in five Ken Burns documentaries. At least one British newspaper covering Melly�s demise spelled Chilton’s name as “Chiltern.”

The obituarist for London’s Daily Telegraph loftily refers to Melly having “leched, drunk and blasphemed his way around the clubs and pubs of the British Isles ... for five decades.” This Sydney occasion contained no blasphemy (at which even in my rather lily-livered 20s I would have drawn the line), no drunkenness, a strictly moderate alcohol intake, and rather less in the way of lecherous verbiage than can be heard in five minutes at your nearest junior-high playground. Perhaps Melly had toned down his act for the benefit of foreigners, whereas “oop North” he could let himself go. Perhaps.

At any rate, on this occasion Melly specialized in the double-entendre, to the perceptible bemusement of his younger hearers, who had grown up in a culture dominated (nay, saturated) by the single-entendre. “Ah Cain’t Do Without Mah Kitchen Man,” the discreetly phrased tale of a servant whose appeal to his mistress by no means stops with his cooking, was typical of Melly’s repertoire. It could have been sung in 1906 instead of 1986, and possibly it was. Only on this occasion do I remember Melly essaying a Deep Southern Fried accent. For the rest of the evening, whether singing or speaking, he stuck to BBC English.

As for his boozing, it is true that he would drain several glasses between items or during instrumental interludes—after around 1981 he eschewed his nightly bottle of whiskey for a nightly bottle of wine—but he never seemed in the slightest degree incapacitated by grog. Many a singer one-third of his age would have envied his self-control.

His public incontinence was not alcoholic or sexual but verbal. Like too many showfolk in the epoch of Angelina Jolie, Melly fancied himself on occasion as an Important Thinker, in which role he routinely and spectacularly failed. He probably had less capacity for abstract thought than did his Zoot suit. The British Humanist Association (of which during the 1970s he served as president), the National Secular Society, Ban-The-Bomb protests, the mid-1980s’ Marxist-led coalminers: these and other such causes he enthusiastically supported. In none of these connections did he do anything more interesting than spout cliches that had already seemed stupid when Bertrand Russell was leading peaceniks at Aldermaston. They would not be worth noting but for Melly’s determination that profile-writers should note them. Thank goodness they never seem to have impinged on the content of his music-making, even if at the Sydney gig he let fly with a scatological allusion—which I have no intention of repeating—to Margaret Thatcher.

I met Melly briefly after that 1986 show (he kindly signed my copy of his touring diary, Mellymobile), but I never saw him again. During his last years he apparently suffered from dementia, a condition which left no discernible effect upon his artistic skill, though it did, as he himself acknowledged, sharpen his natural love of surrealism: a love already honed by his increasing deafness. No audience was too disgusting, no accommodation too dismal, to quench his mania for performance. His American despatches could be studied with profit by Bernard-Henri Levy and every other tiresome tourist who thinks that mere blatherskite about democracy can turn you into a latter-day Toqueville. Multitudes would happily swap the whole of Monsieur le Docteur Levy’s hyperventilating for one scrap of Melly reportage: such as the sign he discovered which says “Keep New York clean. Eat pigeons.” Or the cockroach bait, also in the Big Apple, which Melly saw advertised as The Roach Motel: “They check in,” ran the slogan, “but they never check out.”

Kenneth Tynan, whom Melly somewhat resembled in verbal panache and philosophical confusion, once remarked of another North British comic, Sid Field: “I think a saint would have laughed at Sid Field without shame or condescension.” Tynan on sainthood is hardly an unimpeachable expert, but his phrase could be used about Melly with equal justice.

Melly has been in Arthur’s bosom for less than a month. Already I miss him. Mistress Quickly rather missed Falstaff too.

To those of us who knew and respected for years the journalism of Samuel Francis (1947-2005), it remains hard to believe that he is gone. The outlets that regularly published him – Chronicles, VDARE, The American Conservative, Middle American News and others – seem, as their editors would doubtless admit, strangely diminished without his copy. At least we now have what has long been lacking: a comprehensive Samuel Francis Reader, by which existing admirers can observe afresh his versatility, and (with luck) new readers can be lured on board.

Other authors’ obituaries have given numerous details of Francis’s background, idiom, outlook, and philosophical influences. Further details occur in this book’s shrewd accompanying tributes by Patrick Buchanan, Joseph Sobran, and Peter Gemma. Suffice it here to cite Francis’s lifelong love of English history -– seventeenth-century English history above all –- and literature: a love very different from the bemused ignorance so frequent among Francis’s compatriots, who all too often share the misconception lamented by Alistair Cooke, that almost every educated Englishman is “an eighth earl accustomed to whipping the peasants.” There was in Francis a quasi-Cromwellian contempt for genteel, debauched poseurs (the Prince Ruperts of our time), though also a most un-Cromwellian concision and breadth of scholarship.

Ultimately, nonetheless, what made Francis one of America’s most compulsively readable modern essayists was not his intellectual debt to Lord Clarendon and other protagonists of the English Civil War, but his courage, his stylistic sharpness, his frequent gallows-humor, and his total freedom from party-politicking. While he did work for two Republican Senators, John East and Jesse Helms, no American writer of recent times has more bracingly excoriated the delusion that vox G.O.P., vox Dei, or been less prone to credit such unlovely pro-abort, Caucasophobic specimens as Rudolph Giuliani with serious conservative principles. In one stinging sentence (p. 61), Francis – amid a 2003 article called “‘Movement Conservatism’ Now Irrelevant” – sees off “the Beltway Right, that dwindling and never-merry band of direct mail scam artists, ‘think tank’ czars, decrepit ‘youth leaders,’ journalists with phony British accents, and professional Family Values activists who haven’t seen their own kids for 20 years.”

Francis is equally scathing about the single most pernicious fantasy which American neoconservatism (and, let it be said, Australian neoconservatism too) preaches: the myth of Economic Man, thirsting for a perpetual materialist paradise, who thereby calls to mind the famous definition of a mule: “without pride of ancestry, or hope of posterity.” Francis himself traced this myth, in an American context, to the Lincoln regime: which, by accident –-since there is no evidence that Lincoln consciously thought through the implications of what he was doing –- led “to the unlimited expansion of centralized state power, the destruction of the power and authority of the states, and the enthronement of Economic Man as the summum bonum of human endeavor.” Given this development, there is (as Francis notes) no cause for surprise that “an American public expresses indifference to the moral conduct of the chief executive [Clinton at the time] and praises him for his successful management of the economy” (p. 201).

No commentator surpassed Francis in his awareness of Third World immigration’s costs to America’s social contract. One of Shots Fired’s longest pieces is Francis’s analysis (pp. 221-262) of the informal but brilliantly organized 1980s network known as Sanctuary. Dominated by almost 300 churches, which purveyed then-fashionable tripe about liberation theology, Sanctuary encouraged hordes of immigrants -– euphemistically known, of course, as “refugees” -– to flee from El Salvador and Guatemala (though not from such Marxist havens as Nicaragua) and to settle in America without the particle of a legal right. Accordingly, it is to this decade that the origins of America’s current immigration disaster can, and should, be traced. Francis has named names, shown how Communists infiltrated the relevant lawyers’ organizations from the start, and emphasized the millenarian hatred for the white Christian West which Sanctuary’s spokesmen displayed. Still, one wonders if even the overtly leftist Sanctuary could match, for sheer malevolence, the pro-immigration phantasms now peddled on Wall Street. Everything that Sanctuary recommended in terms of “creative destruction” -– the objects to be destroyed being, basically, you and me -– is today advocated by the entire American political and economic establishment from George W. Bush down. The vocabulary of this establishment differs from Sanctuary’s; in place of boilerplate Marxist lingo, we have bellyaching about the evils of “racism”, “fascism”, and “nativism.” Alas, the principles, as opposed to the lexicon, have not changed a jot.

For anyone seriously doubting the continuity between old-fashioned socialistic hatred and new-fashioned plutocratic hatred (to the limited extent that these phenomena differ from one another at all), Francis’s repeated discussions of the political class’s anti-Confederate obsession will constitute a tonic. It is instructive, although it is also nauseating, to read Francis’s accounts of how Big Business and its tame media appease the NAACP, in order to condemn not only the flying of Confederate flags, but every other manifestation (however mild) of pride in Southern heritage. Even the 1999 firebombing and defacing (p. 282) of a Robert E. Lee mural in Virginia—“White devil”, “black baby-killer”, and “kill the white demons” were among the more tasteful graffiti adorning this portrait—failed to inspire the smallest qualms among masochistic rich whites about the wisdom of such truckling.

The Church of Martin Luther King continues to be America’s established creed, backed up by a governmental infrastructure of terror and coercion that no Spanish Inquisitor in his most surreal dreams could have imagined. This, moreover, despite the fact that King’s plagiarism, sexual squalor, and Communistic fellow-travelling have been matters of public record for a quarter of a century, thanks in part to Francis’s own efforts. In one of his 2003 columns, “A Little Real Black History”, Francis not only puts King in his place (that place being somewhere between Che and Ho Chi Minh); he also reveals the similar Red sympathies of King’s female counterpart, Rosa Parks. Mrs. Parks’s Stalinist minders knew that what mattered for their cause was not that Mr. and Mrs. Average White America be persuaded to believe in Stalinism—an unlikely prospect at the best, or worst, of times—but simply that they be taught to loathe their own history, their own culture, and finally their own race:
Immersed in white guilt, a vast number of Americans now accept that the entire history of their nation up to the 1960s was a dark age of repression and hatred, with only a few bright spots like Abraham Lincoln and the crusade against Hitler. Having lost their own history, Americans can no longer expect to keep the nation their history created and defined. That, of course, was the whole point .... It’s an amazing story, about how an entire people was bamboozled out of its own heritage and its own country (pp. 163-164).

Francis maintained the most robust pessimism about the prospects of America recivilizing itself, or even of learning to slouch (rather than continuing to hurtle) towards Gomorrah. Perhaps the best antidote to such pessimism—or, at any rate, the most appropriate reason for questioning it—is the very fact that this book can appear in the U.S.A.; that, instead of bearing all the typographical hallmarks of Crank Lit, it can be handsomely produced on good paper stock, with an agreeable font which encourages rather than deterring the reader; that it can be comprehensively advertised; and that authors of Buchanan’s fame can support it. Merely to compare Francis’s achievement with the craven adolescent chatter of Australia’s own mainstream “conservatives” is to grasp anew a central literary truth of our time. That truth is this: America might not be a good country for a courageous and independent-minded author to earn his bread in, but every other country is now still worse.